Tired of havng incredibly long xpath statements when using the "xpath" keyword in your orchestration expression shapes? (They are generally long because of the xml namespace issues, unless your documents do not use namespaces. When namespaces are in play...

(Update: The original download files were missing the PDB-to-GAC functionality I've discussed before. Please download again if you have already...) The BizTalk Deployment Framework has been updated to work with BizTalk 2006...It is hard to believe that...

Update: Andy pointed out that Tom Abraham has given this a thorough treatment here . There appear to be cases where having BizTalk 2004 and the .NET 2.0 framework installed on the same machine may cause you some difficulty. I've seen a few instances where...

In my last post I indicated there was a better story in BizTalk 2006 for working with the C# code that is generated as an intermediate when compiling ODX (orchestration) files - that is, better than having to deal with temporary files and the BizTalk...

In the last release of the BizTalk Deployment Framework, an additional feature was added that I thought deserved its own post for explanation... If you are responsible for troubleshooting BizTalk applications in production, you are likely hungry for all...

There are some updates to the Deployment Framework and log4net story that I've been meaning to release for quite some time. After this, I'll focus my deployment efforts on BizTalk 2006 (didn't I say that last release?) Below are a list of revisions. On...

I've noticed that - despite a fair bit of discussion on the topic - many folks wind up using atomic scopes simply to avoid serialization requirements for .Net types within an orchestration. It isn't surprising this is the past of least resistance - after...

I had a chance to speak at the Twin Cities BizTalk User Group last Thursday. It was a great turnout, entirely too much pizza, and a lot of fun to talk to folks throughout the area about how they are using BizTalk. The deployment talk had 2004 content...

This great post from Tomas on receiving ack/nack notifications from the MSMQ[C] adapter prompted me to write up something I had researched a few weeks back... But first, a bit of background... When doing work with message queueing systems, a very common...

I had the pleasure of delivering a short talk at the Business Process Integration & Workflow Conference last week in Redmond. The whole conference was great, especially meeting quite a few folks in person I'd only conversed with via email. Being notified...

You can find my thoughts on a really simple message replay (message re-processing) technique for BizTalk in Stephen Thomas' The BizTalker newsletter. Check it out here . For additional clarification, I've created a quick Visio here .

I worked through a problem recently with a client that really took me by surprise - because I would think that many BizTalk shops would be running into this issue regularly. So! Here goes with an explanation and a solution. We ran into this problem initially...

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the PDC this year...However, a good colleague by the name of Jordan Terrell has put together this great PST file for the PDC with all the sessions as calendar appointments. (Open as a data file in Outlook,...

In my last entry, I discussed some ways that can making working with binding files a bit easier. Here is another post in that same vein that addresses a common pain point... Un-escaping TransportTypeData One of the annoying things about binding files...

With BizTalk 2004, it can be quite helpful to eventually maintain binding files as "source code". After a solution has reached a certain point of stability (where port definitions are not changing often), many projects will use the Deployment Wizard to...

Version 2.6 of the Deployment Framework is now available (see the download links - the full download , core , and tools have all been updated.) Future work in this area will be about augmenting the already-great deployment story in BizTalk 2006! The release...

Will this be the last place on the web that trumpets the BizTalk 2006 beta? Likely not, but I did see it in quite a few places today. Head to http://beta.microsoft.com with your passport and 'BizTalkBetaTeam' for a guest ID, and then wait patiently. ...

A whole raft of whitepapers for BizTalk have been released over the last several weeks - see here and here . I completed a whitepaper a short while back (though just released) on getting the most out of the BizTalk 2004 Management Pack and Microsoft Operations...

TechEd 2005 was a great time, and I really enjoyed the extended look at BizTalk 2006 - lots of great presentations. Much more has been done in this release than I had anticipated, and I look forward to digging into the CTP build. Thanks to those who attended...

As has been noted before in the lore of BizTalk, it sure would be useful to use a real debugger with orchestrations - at least occasionally. There are times when an expression shape winds up getting a bit sticky (not that I would know...) and a debugger...