I’m delighted to pre-announce that BizTalk innovation Event is coming to Portugal! The event is called “Oporto BizTalk Innovation Day” and will take place in Oporto, Portugal on Thursday 14 March, 2013. This is the first time in Portugal (also on Iberia) that we are conducting a full day event dedicated to Microsoft BizTalk Server. […]
Blog Post by: Sandro Pereira
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 reason […]
Blog Post by: Johann
I recently hit an issue with the BAM_AN packages executed through a SQL job failing with the following message. Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at…. UpdateDataSourceAndGetAnnotation(String cubeName, String asServerName, String asDatabaseName, String ssServername, String ssDatabaseName) The reason was the account under which my SQL jobs were running did not have […]
Blog Post by: DipeshA
We got caught with this error recently when built a new BizTalk server. Every time we tried to browse to the web portal we got a 503 error and the application pool would stop. We could restart the app pool without error. It took us a while to work out the root cause. We checked […]
Blog Post by: mbrimble
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 used in. Recovering from these […]
Blog Post by: Johann
When I started blogging a year ago I had no idea how much it would help me progress my own learning, and how rewarding a hobby I was going to gain. If not for the feedback and interest in myblog posts Imightnot have been quite so motivated to keep it up. As a big thank […]
Blog Post by: Johann
Recently at the BizTalk Summit in London I was asked a question about Message Archiving from BizTalk and one of the most common solutions to this is the Message Archiving Pipeline Component which was written by my old friend Nick Heppleson.
The C# compiler is a pretty good thing, but it has limitations. One limitation that has given me a headache this evening is its inability to guard against cycles in structs. As I learn to think and programme in a more functional style, I find that I am beginning to rely more and more on structs to pass data. This is natural when programming in the functional style, but structs can be damned awkward blighters.
Here is a classic gotcha. The following code won’t compile, and in this case, the compiler does its job and tells you why with a nice CS0523 error:
struct Struct1
{
public Struct2 AStruct2 { get; set; }
}
struct Struct2
{
public Struct1 AStruct1 { get; set; }
}
Structs are value types and are automatically instantiated and initialized as stack objects. If this code were compiled and run, Struct1 would be initialised with a Struct2 which would be initialised with a Struct1 which would be initialised with a Struct2, etc., etc. We would blow the stack.
Well, actually, if the compiler didn’t capture this error, we wouldn’t get a stack overflow because at runtime the type loader would spot the problem and refuse to load the Struct1 type. I know this because the compiler does a really rather poor job of spotting cycles. For example, if you define generic members on your structs things can easily go awry. I have an example of this, but it would take a lot of explaining as to why I wrote the code the way I did (believe me, I had reason to), so instead I’ll provide a much simpler example. Here is a daft attempt to avoid the cycle using a nullable type:
struct Struct1
{
public Struct2? Struct2 { get; set; }
}
struct Struct2
{
public Struct1 Struct1 { get; set; }
}
Of course, this won’t work (duh – so why did I try?). System.Nullable<T> is, itself, a struct, so it does not solve the problem at all. We have simply wrapped one struct in another. However, the C# compiler can’t see the problem. The code will compile just fine. At run-time it will blow up in your face with a ‘Could not load type <T> from assembly’ (80131522) error. Very nasty.
By and large, I get on well with the C# compiler. However, this is one area where there is room for improvement.
It’s only a week since our big BizTalk Summit 2013, London event. Today I’m here in Amsterdam presenting in another BizTalk Event sharing the stage with Richard Seroter and Steef-Jan Wigger. The event was arranged by ESTREME (Netherland based consultancy company focused on BizTalkAdministrationand operations). Richard Seroter presented on Patterns of CloudIntegration’sand he explained in […]
The post Great start to 2013, another BizTalk Event in Amsterdam appeared first on BizTalk360 Blog.
Blog Post by: Saravana Kumar
If you are a UX designer, you have undoubtedly been at a client gathering requirements when they say the magic words, “There are some users who will want to do that, but they’re only a couple of people.”
This sends your internal monologue into a quizzical frenzy: How many is a couple? Are we not going […]
Blog Post by: Matt Donahue