Office 2007 Delay? Actually, No.

by | Mar 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

There has been a lot of confusion over the announcement that Office 2007 would also reschedule its consumer launch date to January 2007 to match that of Vista.  This marketing launch is a different animal than the development and availability date of the Office 2007 product(s).


Microsoft clarifies this with a press release that reads as follows:


—-


Microsoft Confirms Timeline for 2007 Microsoft Office System
Product on track for October RTM.


REDMOND, Wash. – March 24, 2006 – Yesterday, Microsoft Corp. confirmed the timeline for release and availability of its 2007 Microsoft%u00ae Office system. The company remains on track to complete work on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in October of this year and is planning to make the product available to the business customers through the volume licensing program in October 2006. Retail and OEM availability of the product are scheduled to coincide with the retail and OEM availability of the Windows Vista%u2122 operating system in January 2007.


—–


It has been stated that Beta 2 will be available in June, and the above press release specifies October as the RTM and bits available date.  Rock on!

BizTalk 2006 RTM is here!

by | Mar 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Congratulations to the BizTalk team for another awesome release and for keeping on schedule. These guys are like clockwork man! It was just 2 years ago that we got BizTalk 2004 and now we get this great update with awesome feature updates to BAM, administration and the messaging engine. I’m psyched about being able to use this new release in our BizTalk course.

Another BizTalk Presentation

by | Mar 27, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I always forget to post these in advance.


I am doing another BizTalk Presentation at Btug, tomorrow night (March 28) in Toronto.


It is split into two parts:
i)Handling Large Messages in BizTalk
ii)Extending BizTalk Transformations into Sql Server


Also ObjectSharp will be giving away a free seat for a 5 day course -> Building BizTalk 2006 Solutions Best Practices with the first delivery of the course slated for May 1 2006. You can read more about the presentation Here

One more EventStream!

by | Mar 26, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

A quick correction on my earlier BAM posting, there are actually four EventStreams in BizTalk Server 2006, there is the MessagingEventStream which operates in the same way as the OrchestrationEventStream in that it’s transactionally consistent with the pipeline execution “transaction” and should be used within a custom pipeline.


Thanks to Keith Lim for spotting my mistake, who by the way has a great BAM focused blog which is great to see!

Secure Shell (SSH) Enabled FTP Adapter for BizTalk

by | Mar 25, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication


Since there is not enough information available on the sFTP adapters for
BizTalk, thought would post this one, you can find the article here,
sFTP adapters for BizTalk

This document is more focused on the BizTalk side rather than SSH, however I
have provided some basic background information on
SSH servers and clients using the RSA key based authentication in my previous post.




BizTalk 2004/2006 doesn’t have any built in support for sFTP adapters, they
only support traditional FTP adapters, hence we are only left with two options,
either we need to develop our own custom adapters for sFTP or purchase it from
other clients, for more information read the article I had posted on the
sFTP adapter.

RSA Public-Key based Authentication

 


BizTalk Tidbits

by | Mar 24, 2006 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I have a bunch of tidbits that I have found, and instead of creating a blog entryfor each of them, I have put them alltogether into one big entry.I hope that there issomething in this foreveryone!

Items Explained:
1.Using the Flat File Schema you can define custom date formats. One word of caution, in order to use this feature, you have to guarantee that the date is going to be present.

2.Using XPath, you can take advantage of features of XPath, namely count(), substring-before(), substring-after() and all other available XPath functions. Example:

MessageCount=(System.Int32)xpath(CompleteMsg,”count(/*[local-name()=’File’ and namespace-uri()=’http://AppendExample.File’]/*[local-name()=’Record’ and namespace-uri()=’http://AppendExample.Record’])”);

And

FirstName=xpath(IndividualMsg.BodyPart,”substring-before(/*[local-name()=’Record’ and namespace-uri()=’http://AppendExample.Record’]/*[local-name()=’Information’ and namespace-uri()=’’]/@*[local-name()=’Name’ and namespace-uri()=’’],’ ’)”);

LastName=xpath(IndividualMsg.BodyPart,”substring-after(/*[local-name()=’Record’ and namespace-uri()=’http://AppendExample.Record’]/*[local-name()=’Information’ and namespace-uri()=’’]/@*[local-name()=’Name’ and namespace-uri()=’’],’ ’)”);

3.Since there is no such thing as an Envelope Schema that can be used in a Flat File scenario, you can use XPath to extract internally the separate documents and manipulate the data as needed. Example:

xpathString=System.String.Format(”/*[local-name()=’File’ and namespace-uri()=’http://AppendExample.File’]/*[local-name()=’Record’ and namespace-uri()=’http://AppendExample.Record’][{0}]”,CurrentRecord);

tempXML=new System.Xml.XmlDocument();

tempXML=xpath(CompleteMsg,xpathString);

4.You don’t need to have a Construct Shape with an internal Message Assignment Shape, you can simply use the Construct Keyword; you can construct multiple messages at the same time. Example:

construct AfterMsg,BeforeMsg
{
AfterMsg=tempAfterXML;
BeforeMsg=tempBeforeXML;
}

One word of caution though, if you are using the Tracking Profile Editor to capture data, it will not show as an option, so use this only if you are not going to use the TPE.

5.You can take a message and convert it into text for insertion into database columns:

tempXMLData=IndividualMsg.BodyPart;
StringWriter=new System.IO.StringWriter();
XmlTextWriter=new System.Xml.XmlTextWriter(StringWriter);
tempXMLData.WriteTo(XmlTextWriter);
rawXmlData=StringWriter.ToString();

6.Using XPath, you can update attributes/elements. Example:

xpathString=System.String.Format(”/*[local-name()=’Request’ and namespace-uri()=’http://exampleDataStore’]/*[local-name()=’sync’ and namespace-uri()=’http://exampleDataStore’]/*[local-name()=’after’ and namespace-uri()=’http://exampleDataStore’]/*[local-name()=’DataStore’ and namespace-uri()=’http://exampleDataStore’][{0}]/@*[local-name()=’FirstName’ and namespace-uri()=’’]”,CurrentRecord);

xpath(tempDBInsertMsg,xpathString)=FirstName;

Word of caution though: you need to make sure that the attribute/element exists, xpath will not create it, just populate it.

7.Using Microsoft’s built in System.XML functionality; you can append data inside of an already existing xml structure. Example:

internalBeforeXmlDocument=IndividualMsg.BodyPart;
tempBeforeXML=(System.Xml.XmlDocument) tempBeforeXML.CloneNode(true);
XmlNode = tempBeforeXML.CreateNode (System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Element,”ns1″,”Record”,”http://appendexample.record/“);
XmlNode.InnerXml=internalBeforeXmlDocument.FirstChild.InnerXml;
tempBeforeXML.FirstChild.AppendChild(XmlNode);
BeforeMsg=tempBeforeXML;

8.Using Multi-part messages, you can call Business Rules to update ’Context’ data, since the BRC cannot access the Context data, accessing the Context Part of the data serves the same purpose.