Why Biztalk Expression Editor is So USELESS

After spending few days on implementing dynamic routing using the Expression shape.

I am ready to scream. Why did biztalk needed the additional “Expression Language”.

Why don’t just create a C# editor, which will edit a public method of some partual calss.

And define all globals biztalk exports like messages, promoted variables etc in the rest of the class, hidden from user. It would make Biztalk integration MUCH more useful for users.

Why do I need to create a separate assembly, just to make things work. And I am not asking to much,

just a simple conversion stuff Int32.ToString()… Cast is supported… actually not really

(System.String)MyMessage(MySchemas.Schemas.MyInt)

surprise simple types are not boxed and you can’t call methods on them. As well as 60 other limitations, which make the “Expression Language” quite useless…

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/biztalkorchestration/Jun2005/post23246451.asp

Even in SSIS you can write natural code scriptlets directly in the workflow…

And don’t tell me that Biztalk is created fo business analysts to drag shapes around and make BPM visual, and I am asking too much with the C# scriptlet support….

Biztalk main usage to make the system integration easier, faster and mor efficient, and not painfull, try-that-ifthe-other-thing didn’t-work, and full of workarounds.

By amount of time rquired on creating workarounds. It would be much faster to write a windows service which will do few configured xslt transformations for me and ship file to ftp….