BizTalk 2013 Artifact Dependency Viewer

In a typical bizTalk server enviroment that has been around for sometime and you have multiple developers working on the environment figuring out which artifact is being used by which other artifact becomes a pain. For instance a pipeline component that you are trying to undeploy might be used by some other solution and it was not very easy to find out which other port is using it.

 

 

In BizTalk 2013 there is an Artifact explore that will show you all the dependencies that exist. It will do it wheather an artifact uses another artifact as well as whether an artifact is used by another artifact. For  Example it will tell you which maps are used by a particual send port , but also show which Orchestrations are using that Send port. Here is a full table of what the Artifact Explorer shows
 

Quite nifty and useful, isn't it ?
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Dynamic Host Handler Assosciation in send ports

I  am sure most of you have used  Dynamic send ports at some point in your BizTalk Developer life and more so if you are using the ESB Toolkit.

One of the problems of bottleneck in the Dynamic send ports was it always used to get assosciated with the Default Host instance and there was no way to control the behaviour. So now if you have a lot of Dynamic send ports this becomes a problem.

In BizTalk 2013 now you have the ability to change the send port handler assosciation . The way you do this if you look at the screenshot below is you can now specify which host to assosciate the send port with based on the type of the port.

 

 

So now for a port that is using say SMTP for instance  you can have a specific host assosciated with the Transport Type. So this now gives you ability to scale in a specific direction.