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One of the interesting challenges I’ve faced in the last year was creating a flat file schema for a well established custom flat file format that was in use at one of my clients. What made this flat file format different from most that I had dealt with in the past was that this flat […] Blog...

A client ask me to create a wiki about BizTalk errors and how to clear it. A quick search on your favorite search engine give me a great technet article. I share it with you because it covers a lot of errors and the explanations are efficients http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles...

The thing I like best about working on group projects is the fact that you get to pick up some really good tricks from others that you didn’t previously know about but they might just take for granted. On my current project I had my young and bright colleague Shikhar Bhagat show me a trick with...

In the previous installment of this series on refactoring BizTalk maps I discussed how you could take the easy road to ensure your maps work when the target namespace of your schema changes, or if the schema is moved to a different project or had it’s .NET type name changed. In this new entry to...

I developed a program which uses SQL Server Compact. Initially it was developed creating SQL Server COmpact 4.0 databases. Now after reinstalling my laptop, I tried to open the database, but it appaered I was missing the necessary tooling for SQL Server Compact 4.0, I could only open/create SQL Server...

Last week I ran into a really interesting issue. When I was running Visual Studio unit tests to validate instances of XML formatted EDIFact messages (see my previous blog post on BizTalk testing for more details on schema testing) I found that my tests just seemed to take forever and timed out with no...

On the very first BizTalk project I worked on, refactoring was a really bad word that almost brought our Gantt chart to its knees. As with many agile projects, evolving requirements required changes to schemas, these changes often being major structural changes which broke all the maps they were being...

I have seen a lot developers struggle with debugging pipeline components and other .NET classes that get executed by BizTalk host instances. I have also often heard statements claiming that these sorts of artifacts are hard or impossible to debug in the BizTalk runtime. I would very much like to clear...

The out of the box unit test framework for BizTalk maps leaves a lot to be desired. Effectively a Visual Studio map unit test is the equivalent of choosing to validate your map, which involves running an instance of an input message through your map and validating the output of the map against it’s...

I’ve been asked quite often of late what the best way to keep track of BizTalk WCF Services is, and I have found myself changing my mind quite a few times on this one (the previous incumbent involved creating WCF Service projects in my BizTalk solutions but I’ve since gone sour on this idea...

You obtain this error if you try to have an active receive location and Orchestration parameters. When you have an activated reception shape, you cannot have orchestration parameters. So make your choice     Blog Post by: Jeremy Ronk

Often ignored, but a really important, persistence points in Biztalk are the key issue in dealing with Orchestration Performance. Many applicative problem come from a misunderstanding of this concept. Sandro perreira (a great biztalk MVP) wrote a great article about it : http://sandroaspbiztalkblog.wordpress...

This week I encountered a curious situation while I was developing a new BizTalk solution. After creating my new project, I tried to add a new schema to the solution, and to my astonishment, the item "Schema" had disappeared from the Visual Studio window "Add new item" in the "BizTalk...

Some colleagues of mine called me over for some advice on a problem they were having in a BizTalk orchestration the other day. They were using a message assignment shape to set the bodies and context properties for a multi-part message which contained two parts which were to be sent out over SMTP on...

This week I ran into the most bizarrely annoying problem, and I found that there was very little information available to guide me. I had a solution that included a BizTalk WCF-NetMsmq receive location for which I had published metadata as well. However, every time I tried to generate proxy code, either...

I have seen a lot of people confused with the SOAP Action Headers section in WCF Send ports. Their purpose isn’t obvious to those who don’t fully understand BizTalk implementation of WCF, or of the WCF based LOB Adapters. In this post I will try to explain what the SOAP Action Headers section...

I have recently been working on an agile BizTalk project which has required me to flesh out testing frameworks for all the different aspects of BizTalk. This has been a somewhat uncharted territory for myself in the past, though not for the lack of desire to explore this area, and was a great exercise...

I assume you already know how to promote properties when sending a message from an orchestration to the messagebox. This can of course be achieved by initializing a correlation set with containing all context properties you like to promote. But that 's not why I'm posting this blog. If you need...

I spent some time this week researching what would be needed to update some of my Visual Studio 2010 extensions to support Visual Studio 2012. I’ve now managed to do so, and would like to share what I found in case anyone else finds it useful. Warning: This post was written and tested with the [...]...

Recently when deploying an application out to IIS we had the need to deploy a sub application within the same domain.  Essentially, what we were trying to do was make the sub application an extension of the parent application, but live in separate app pools and the code base would be kept separate...

When creating schemas I typically follow the rule that each xsd file contains one root node only. However when dealing with schemas that have been generated from metadata it is quite common for schemas to be generated with multipe root nodes. In the case of web services all the request and response schema...

Lately I have come across this annoying little bug (feature?) of Visual Studio while working with BizTalk orchestrations. If an orchestration is opened in XML view and then closed, it will forever more insist on opening up in TEXT view. As you can see, this is not very useful. Right clicking on the orchestration...

If you’re like me (lazy), chances are that you’ve tried to take shortcuts when refactoring BizTalk projects and run into the same trouble that I have. What I’ve found is that if you open a BizTalk orchestration file in the Visual Studio XML viewer and made any changes to it (typical...

Overview This walkthrough will explain how to setup email alerts in TFS when there is a check-in. Using this method, you can not only select a TFS Project, but you can also select an individual folder. This is useful if you are not interested in some folders in the project, but want alerts on others...

Visual Studio LightSwitch seems to be a real productivity booster for some applications. See one demo here how even a business user can create the application. Cheers Rohit Sharma