My experiments with BTS

Nice Regex Tool Espresso..

2012-02-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

Nice Regex tool .http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

Sharepoint and BizTalk Goodness

2011-01-25T13:38:00.001-08:00

Found this excellent post on Sharepoint BizTalk adaptor

How Enterprise Ready is SQL

2010-08-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

I recently got into an interesting debate on Oracle vs SQL and my point was SQL is pretty rock solid and cheaper for most customers. I will let some statistic do some talking

BizTalk 2010 Beta available for Download

2010-05-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

Folks get your hands on the new BizTalk 2010 Beta here The mapper imporivements alone is worth the money if you do lot of complex maps , HIPPA maps , EDI maps.

Quick EDI Sample Reference

2010-04-01T12:39:00.001-07:00

Just Bookmarking for my own use a good link while I mentor people on BizTalk EDI

Biztalk 2009 R2

2009-11-24T18:35:00.001-08:00

Cant wait to get my hands on BizTalk 2009 R2 after the demo video from PDC . See here The mappergets a complete overhaul with help from MSRTop Features - Relevance Tree - Auto Scroll - Gray out out of focus links ( reduce clutter ) - Move to Page - Search - VS 2010 integration

Returning Data from SAP Tables.

2009-08-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

After spending a few frustrating hours on why my SAP RFC call was not returning data and the call was successful . We founf this little gem here from the LOB adapter team blog If you're sending messages using the channel model instead of using a .NET proxy (for example, in BizTalk) - if the table node is missing from the input XML, we interpret that as if you're not interested in that table. If

DTC

2009-08-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

I find myself referring to these mostly trying to analyze SQL issues with BizTalk using DTCPING.I thought I will bookmark these links INFO: Configuring Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) toWork Through a Firewallhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/250367/EN-US/How to configure RPC dynamic port allocation to work with firewallshttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/154596/How to troubleshoot

Bing..

2009-05-31T09:24:00.000-07:00

I have not been excited on anything related to search from Microsoft in a long time . But I am really excited about Wolfarm Alpha the new decision engine from Microsoft . Now named Bing. The site is not up yet and has a video on it's capabilities for now . I cant wait to get my hands on the real thing . It is pretty cool actually. Check it out... www.bing.com and see the video here

SAP mapping and XSLT fun

2009-04-21T12:31:00.001-07:00

If you are on a BizTalk , SAP project , Your XSLT skills can come real handy . For e.g. here I needed to set a flag to true based on the existence of value in a node. Normally this is easy but in this case that node happens to be in a repeatable group node which can occur n number of times where n is unknown . It would be a mapping nightmare or a

Visual Studio 2010

2009-02-16T14:08:00.000-08:00

There are some cool channel 9 videos on Visual Studio 2010 out there . Check them here here

BizTalk and Dublin

2009-02-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

Where is Biztalk going Post OSLO , Have heard this being talked about in many forums lot of FUD out there . For all those I say read Charles Youngs post on Biztalk and Dublin. Highly recommended read .

Playing with BizTalk 2009

2008-10-17T01:42:00.001-07:00

I have started playing with BizTalk 2009 previously R3 bits and there is so much exciting stuff here . The one that I am most excited is Support for Hyper-V virtualization Support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio .NET 2008 and SQL Server 2008 MSbuild (finally ) EDI enchancementsUpdated ESB guidance New SQL and Oracle Apps adapters ( Connect natively to Oracle Financials)UDDI 3.0 RFID

BizTalk HTTP Chunked Encoding issues

2008-02-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

You are probably reading this snippet because you have a perfectly working Biztalk App that works and performs in development and unit test but fails during volume tests with a downstream LOB app like say Peoplesoft with which you are trying to post via HTTP. As you may have realized already this due to a chunked encoding issue with BizTalk . BizTalk uses chunked encoding when a message is larger

SOA Conference 2007 Photos

2007-11-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

Marjan has uploaded the MVP Dinner photos with the product group for those of us who were are at the conference . See the photos at the Biztalk Team blog

Debugging BizTalk 2004 and .net 2.0

2007-11-06T13:11:00.001-08:00

I had to debug an old project in 2004 so got one old 2004 machine but I was not able to get my visual studio to attach to the Biztalk service . The machine had .net 2.0 Framework installed .Some googling and saw this post from Tom about problems with BAS installation and whidbey.So on similar lines I made the followwing changes to my BTSNTSvc.exe.config<?xml version="1.0" ?><configuration&

OSLO - The Microsoft SOA Road Map

2007-11-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

OSLO - The new SOA innovation WaveThe SOA Conference in Redmond always has something that gets you excited , This time it is OSLO .No OSLO is not another cool name for a new product . In fact I wont call OSLO oneproduct but a new way of thinking about having a comprehensive ( Shudder ! ) way ofMODEL driven developing and consuming web services delivered through out the stack spanning multiple

Releasing Source code for .net Framework , WCF, WPF , LINQ

2007-10-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Visual Studio 3.5 Release 2008 is coming with an icing on the cake . The .net framework libraries souurce code is being released under Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).The release will include full visual studio integeration and will intially have The .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security,

Custom XSLT in Biztalk Maps

2007-09-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

Recently someone asked if you can use custom XSLT in Biztalk Maps . The answer is of course yes as the map you built .btm gets translated to an xslt anyway if yo look at the code that gets spewed out .In any case to do that create the map and select source and destination . Click on the map and go to properties. There you will see a property custom XSLT . You can select your custom XSLT here .

Microsoft BPM and SOA Conference 2007

2007-08-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

The dates for the Microsoft SOA and BPM Conference has been announced from Oct 29 to Nov 2nd in MS Campus in Redmond , WA. I like going to the SOA and BPM Conference as it is a more targeted to the line of work I do around BizTalk server 2006 and R2 and frankly between MVP Conference and SOA conference in a year takes up 7 days which I think are well spent on my conference allocation days. Hm..

Covast BBot - Supply Chain Appliance

2007-07-26T09:09:00.001-07:00

I was reading up about the new Covast B2B Appliance the BBot. The idea of appliances in a box is nothing new , but I think as a B2B appliance Covast is the first to offer one that offers supply chain end points an easy way to connect to larger partners . BBot promises built in RFID and SOX compliance . Since it is an appliance model meaning you get the box plug it in and you are ready to

BizTalk on VM machines( Virtual Server , Vmware)

2007-07-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Though it is known that BizTalk Server 2006 was supported on Virtual Server 2005 . There was a silence on its support for othe VM's . It is quite hard to get some good documentation on what is Microsoft's stand on other VM's . This KB I recently saw throws more lightAs per latest documentation (June 7 , 2007 ) BizTalk 2004 and 2006 is supported on Virtual Server and from a guarded silence on

BizTalk Services Announced

2007-04-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

Some time back when I blogged about the future of BizTalk I got some pretty interesting comments , at that time I felt I could not reply more as it was still under NDA . Now that it is not as of today Microsoft is announcing BizTalk in the cloud or to give the newly christened name BizTalk servicesWhat are BizTalk Services?These services, which have been in internal incubation for the past year,

Morfik Patents AJAX compiler

2007-04-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

Just saw this post at slashdot . From all I understood about reading through the whole text , It converts code written in any language to another format( Let us ignore that it is Javascript for a moment here ) and the fact that it is now becomes executable in browser . Doesn't that make it a compiler of some sort . and here I was thinking you cant patent something like a compiler unless you are

BizTalk or WF vs BizTalk and WF

2007-03-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

Well it is interesting to imagine what the future of a product will be that you love very passionaltely . I am of course talking about Biztalk . Ever since WF was announced and was shipped there was a questionIs WF going to replace Biztalk .Is R2 going to be the last release of biztalk .What is after R2 V next . What after VNext .I have heard V Next is going to be based on WF .That is a lot of

BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP

2007-03-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has announced the new BPEL for Windows Workflow CTP .This is an add on the for WF .This provides import and export tools for BPEL and includes WF activities representing BPEL for the WF designer in VS 2005. Check it out here

MVP Summit 2007 Day -1

2007-03-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

Had a real scare in the morning . I had my flight at 9:55 in the morning . at 8 in the morning I realize it is the new US DST switch today ( It used to be first sunday in April , now it is second sunday in March ) . Luckily Bini has all my bags packed . I got into the first pair of jeans and was rushing to the airport at a normal speed limit . Almost got pulled over by a cop :-) .Flight was on

Encryption Decryption using BizTalk

2007-03-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

Many have asked me how to configure biztalk with certificates and I tell them it is really easy . But many seems to have a big challenge with it. Sometimes it is the lack of proper understanding of the secrurity infrastructure . sometimes it is things like not setting up the thumbprint. I was planning on writing an article on the same . But today i saw a good post from Richard and I dont think I

BIZTALK R2 and RFID

2007-02-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

Biztalk R2 is nearing release and with support of RFID being delivered it will open a new area for biztalk apps altogether. I am excited about RFID as a technology though the technology is under fire including boycott by many activist group . Some of the concerns regarding privacy are valid but the potential of the technology is amazing. RFID or Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a data

BizTalk Server 2006 Large Maps

2007-01-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

There is a little gem in 2006 that lets you control how large messages are transformed .Previouslt in 2004 if you had a fairly large transformation , there i s nothing much you could do than scale up the server with more memory. In 2006 you could let BizTalk us the disk after a particular threshold , By default that value us set to 1 MB . That means if your XSLT transformation (which you realize

Biztalk and EntSSO Issues

2006-12-13T08:08:00.000-08:00

Time and again we run into Enterprise SSO issues with Biztalk databases. If your database team itself is seperate it is little hard to figure out where exactly the problems lie . SSO issues are mostly realted to MSDTC settings . It is not a common knowledge but there is an SSO configuration and troubleshooting tool . This does not fix any issue but just gives you a report . Get the tool here

Getting Custom Queries into HAT

2006-10-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

You probably know that you can write your own custom HAT queries apart from the default HAT Queries that are available . I have seen people write their own little queries that they write or get from somewhere and use it to run some specific query often by copying into the text box of a show query window . Did you know you can get your custom queries into HAT .See Here If you want to do that it

BPM and SOA conference - Day 4

2006-10-06T23:04:00.000-07:00

Day 4 I opted to attend Jon's sessions as he always has this high energy when he speaks . So true to that I picked two of jon's session Developing Applications for the Web 2.0 and Generating Orchestrations Using a Visual Studio Wizard. The Orchestraion Wizard session was a complete dive in hands on on the tool . I was reallly blown away with the tool . This basically lets you templatize your

BPM and SOA conference - Day 3

2006-10-05T22:41:00.000-07:00

Day 3 I missed the first session, most part of it amyway Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating Custom Activities for Workflows , Remember the movie and the relaxing yesterday .Anyway I had downloaded all the labs that day which has a Custom Activty lab . i then took the Driving Business Process Automation through Vertical Accelerators Brennan O’Reilly & Mark Smith . The had some intersting case

BPM and SOA conference - Day 2

2006-10-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

Day 2 : The session started with Customer Panel: SOA Success Stories for me and I was realy amazed at the cariety and scale of challenges that Biztalk is solving . The next session thta i picked was Avoiding 3 Common Pitfalls in Service Contract Design by Tim Ewald. This was a great session , This did focus on the facts that message contracts and schemas do evolve no matter how much reasearch

BPM and SOA conference - Day 1

2006-10-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

Day 1: Went in Registerd for the conference and went to the keynote talk By David Chappel "Conference Keynote: SOA, BPM, and Microsoft: A Pragmatic View"This was one of the best talk that I had at the conference . It really does give you a pragmatic view of things. The next session was by John deVadoss on Real World SOA .This really had some intersting comparison on the big bang approach vs

BPM and SOA conference - Day 0

2006-10-02T21:55:00.000-07:00

Day 0 : I had a kind of Bad flight from here to Seattle on US airways . After a really tough scrutinizing at security where they bought out everything from my aftershave , deo and my bottle of Dasani(Water) . I got on my flight from Elmira to Philly. I had a 45 minute connection which became a 20 minute connection as flight was late . So had a real tough time running from one terminal to

BizTalk on Virtual Server

2006-09-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

There is considerable interest these days on virtualization and the benefits of virtualization in terms of bringing down the hardware and licensing cost .While I agree that the hardware cost and annual support cost does come down. The software licensing cost is not so straight forward. The answer really is it depends. Let us say your organization A has 2 SQL Servers and 2 BizTalk servers. So that

BizTalk Server Goodies

2006-09-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

There is a new BizTalk Server 2006 Troubleshooting Guide has been published. This has lot of troubleshooting techniques and tips. I found a few here . Higly recommended read . Get it here There is also an Adapter comparison guide . Check out

Speaking at CNUG- DAM

2006-08-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

I am speaking at CNUG- DAM . CNUG- DAM is a chapterr of chennai DotNet user group and is the only Design , Architecture and Management group in India The topic for the talk is "Common Enterprise Integration problems, Design Patterns and Solutions using BizTalk "Brief Agenda Talk about some common problems faced in EAI world and how biztalk can be used to address those effectively.

Multiple Schemas in Custom Pipelines

2006-07-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

I am loving Biztlak 2006 more and more . One of the cool feature of Biztalk 2006 which is proving a great help for me is the multiple pipeline in the same stage . For eg let us you have a situation wher you have multiple flat files coming in and you need to find the schema . So normally we will put a flat file Dissasembler in and create a custom recive pipeline and we will need to create 3

Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Source Safe

2006-07-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

After spending quite a bit of time playing with Menus on my Visual Studio 2005 to find the option of "Add my solution to Source control " that was there in my prev VS version I realized that I had not installed Source control at all . This was weird as I did not remember explicitly unchecking any of the options except VJ# which i thought I was not going to need probably. I ran setup again chose

Understanding BizTalk Management Databases ( BiztalkMgmtDB)

2006-07-07T16:47:00.000-07:00

I tried to bring out the ER diagram of some of the major tables in the management databses. I had to omit a few ( a lot :-) to get it into one screen )Part 1 Servers Hosts and ProcessesFirst is the Table adm_Group which contains information about BizTalk Groups. They contain information like cache frequency, the large message ,threshold bytes and certificate thumb print. This is in a way the

Biztalk 2006 R2 TAP nominations Open

2006-06-12T05:57:00.000-07:00

In case you missed , Microsoft has announced a new release of BizTalk Server 2006 called BizTalk Server 2006 R2. No no this is not a SP , This is a new set of additions that did not make it to 2006 and some enhancements to improve compatability with Vista and Office 2007 . Features in brief areMicrosoft EDI Solution for BizTalk 2006Microsoft RFID BizTalk Adapter for Windows Communication

Biztalk 2004 Load Generation Tool

2006-05-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

There is an excellent Biztlak 2004 load generation tool available out there . I did not get a chance until recently to use it .So when we had a requirement to stress test a Disaster Recovery standby box , I downloaded the tool. The installtion gave me . Errr 1904.Module C:\Program Files\LoadGen\ComFileMonitor.dll failed to registerAfter being stumped for a while I went and looked at System

Biztalk Server Best Practices Analyzer

2006-04-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

I had heard about a new Biztalk 2006 Best Practices Analyzer tool . This was supposed to scan your biztalk implementation and point out irregularities. This could be stuff like your Biztalk purgejobs are not running .This could seriously slow you down after some time. Or your Master secret server is not backed up . There is some good posting and screenshots in Richard's Blog.

Failed to Create SQL Login for Biztalk Administrators Group

2006-04-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Failed to Create SQL Login for Biztalk Administrators Group on Database Server <> for Windows NT user or Group "DOMAIN\BTS2004 Biztalk Administrator" You get the above message and you are already logged on as the user who has full permission to the SQL Server group . We got this error when we were configuring a new server in our production environement . I had faced this problem before but I had

Biztalk 2006 hits RTM

2006-03-24T09:09:00.000-08:00

Biztalk 2006 RTM released !!! .By the way RTM stands for Ready To Market I guessd this is one day earlier than announced .Very exceited at this product releasing in this time frame. Its out there for those of you who have MSDN subscribtion , on MSDN Downloads.

Biztalk Property Schema issue when Deploying

2006-03-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

We recently had a problem with a Biztalk property schema deployment .When we tried to deploy the schema , We came across this error and had to spend some time trying to debug this one. The error you get would be a variation of the one below Property "ns0:Your_Promoted_Property" (msgType="YourSchema#RootNode") not found in Configuration database. Quick Solution Delete the Node which it is

Biztalk Podcasts

2006-02-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

Listen to Biztalk Server Podcasts from Scott where he talks about Enterprise Service Bus and Windows Workflow Foundation .Scott answers lot of intersting question here .. Like how did he become product manager of Latinum (Biztalk 2000). While on code names these are the list so far.. Latinum --- BizTalk 2000 Bizet --- BizTalk 2002Voyager --- BizTalk

PublishMessageException - A batch item failed persistence

2006-02-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

I recently had to debug one of the errors for a buddy of mine and it take me some time to fix it ,It was quite intersting and i thought was worth noting down You get the Error below --------------------------------------------------------Event Type: ErrorEvent Source: XLANG/sEvent Category: NoneEvent ID: 10034Description:Uncaught exception terminated service

Biztalk Password Resets

2006-01-12T21:02:00.000-08:00

Well we have our enterprise password Resets that happen every 45 days ; This causes Havoc to my local biztlak server installation.THIS information Applies if you have NOT backed up your master secret( Thanks Patrick for pointing out this ) .if you have in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Enterprise Single Sign-On>ssoconfig.exe -restoresecret YouBTSSSOBackupfileSo one day you reset that password and

Loading Dynamic Maps in Biztalk Orchestrations

2006-01-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

I had a situation in which I had to map into a single schema when messages are send by different parties . Normally this would be done at the recieve port level and document is standardized , but one drawback of this approach is exception handling which is a pain in these situations . It would be great if we can dynamically load a map inside the orchestration and then normalize and we can have or

Error while calling Orchestration Exposed as Webservice

2005-12-29T06:59:00.000-08:00

If you are trying to call the Orchestration that are exposed as webservice , You will come acros this error below . This usually happens in Dev machines where Biztalk as well as IIS is on the same machine. The Messaging Engine failed to register the adapter for "SOAP" for the receive location "/VirtDir/App.asmx". Please verify that the receive location is valid, and that the isolated adapter runs

BTS 2006 MSI Issues

2005-11-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

I have built a Biztalk 2006 Project and I added a Setup project and added the output of the Biztalk project, but when I try to import the MSI that I created using the Biztalk administration console. I get an error saying this is not a valid Biztalk MSI ? Has anybody encountered this error ?PS : But if I export a already deployed application as an MSI , I am able to import it into anothe BTS2006

Calling receive Pipelines from Inside orchestrations BTS2006

2005-11-04T13:31:00.000-08:00

I had some Aggregator Orchestration which were running into Zombie situations ,. So when I got the biztalk 2006 beta version I was anxious to try out the new functionality of being able to call your receive pipeline from inside your Orchestration . You can enumerate through the EnvelopeMessage passed into the recieve pipeline just like you would enumerate in an ICollection or Recordset using

Biztalk Server 2006 Review - Installation

2005-10-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

I started this install on a Virtual PC and I was a bit skeptic if I would be able to finish installation that day , Configuring our development server last time required almost 3 days and another instance I remember configuring a machine with two SQL servers with Analysis server on a different machine almost took a week and a call to MS help desk for some gotcha's .So I was a bit skeptic One of

TO "UNDEPLOY" OR "NOT TO UNDEPLOY"

2005-08-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

If you have been working with Biztalk for a considerable amount of time like me you would have gone through the pains of the Undeploy Regac - Deploy loop , Sometime when you are making changes to Schema , it is quite unavoidable but at lot of time you really don't need to , Just re-gacing your dll and restarting the Biztalk service will do the trick . I have not seen a comprehensive

Biztalk FlatFile Disassembler Processing behavior

2005-06-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a scenario which involves processing a large amount of flat files; each of whihc went througha Flatfile Dissasembler before the business processing on that started. Here I record some points of interest of FFDASM behaviour. When FlatFile Disassembler is fed with a large amount of files biztalk waits for all files to unpack before it starts processing. Our test environment had two

Path Finder , Yukon and Whidbey

2005-06-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

After a long wait and amongst lot of confusion on Whidbey not releasing in 2005 , Now it seems all the three VisualStudio 2005 , SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006 is all going to come out in the Week of November 7. This was announced at TechED 2005Also the Community Tech Preview (CTP) editions are out for BTS 2006.

Biztalk and File Masks Bug /Feature ?

2005-05-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Recently I was debugging a Biztalk solution with a friend of mine Rajesh ,and we noticed a curious Masking issue with BizTalk Suppose you give a mask *.XML Which of these files are picked up ?A) Orders.xmlB) Orders.XMLTESTC) Orders.XML.BAKD) Orders.TXTE) ORDERS.XMLINFOF) ORDERS.XML_BACKUPI am sure your answer is only A , but in reality Biztalk picks up all files except C and D for a mask *.

Error Lookup Tool for BizTalk

2005-05-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

You can lookup your Biztalk Error codes using this tool ,You can look at this tool from inside VS.NET .Download it form Got Dot Net here Once you unzip the tool . You can open up your VStudio->Tools ->ExternalTools and Add this Exe and give a descriptive name like "Biztalk Error Code Lookup"So next time you get an Error , It is right there

Separate Host For Tracking

2005-05-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

A recommended Biztalk best practice for performance is to have a separate Tracking Host . So when you add a separate Tracking host , you might encounter this scenarioEvent Type: ErrorEvent Source: BAM EventBus ServiceEvent Category: NoneEvent ID: 25Date: 5/7/2005Time: 1:53:25 AMUser: N/AComputer: BiztalkProd1Description:Either another TDDS is processing the same data or there is an orphaned

SEHException While Enlisting Orchestration

2005-05-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

I am posting one of the errors we encountered over which considerable time was spent debugging.You will get the below Error in Event LogEvent Type: ErrorEvent Source: XLANG/sEvent Category: NoneEvent ID: 0Date: 5/5/2005Time: 3:22:32 PMUser: N/AComputer: Machine12Description:An SEHException exception occurred while the XLANG/s runtime enlisted a service.Error message:External component has thrown

Biztalk Subscription

2005-04-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

I have often been asked What is the big difference between Biztalk 2002 and 2004 , There are a lot to be frank But if I have to pick one , It will be the much better and unified subscribtion mechanism . If you want to learn more about Biztalk subscribtion Charles Young's Blog Post is a good start

BizTalk Zombies and more..

2005-04-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

You have got this error from biztalk "Completed with discarded messages" and are wondering what that means you could be potentially seeing what in BTS buzz world is called a Zombie . A Zombie is usually a valid message or a response that is left without a subscription to process at that point in time . Though this one liner definition is quite crude explanation . If you are dealing with

Middleware Mantra - Contract First

2005-04-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

When you are designing large middleware integeration efforts , it is quite easy to get into code first integerate later but From classic COM to Biztalk integeration it is always Contract First. Be it an IDL or a Schema . This is generally considered the best way to approch service design. The approach is to design schemas first then generate code from that.More on Contract First approach ..

Choosing between Distinguished vs. Promoted Properties

2005-03-31T06:22:00.000-08:00

In Biztalk you can promote a property as either distinguished or promoted properties. Choosing what to use is trickyDistinguished fieldsIn general use Distinguished fields if you want to just use them in Orchestration Summary - No restriction on field length- No participation in Routing- No seperate property Schema- Not accesible by std pipeline components ( workaround exists in cutom pipeline

Biztalk 2004 Naming Conventions

2005-03-30T12:53:00.000-08:00

I have been looking around for a good Set of Biztalk naming conventions and I came acros this from Scott . Biztalk 2004 Naming Conventions

Unconstructed Message even when Constucted

2005-03-30T10:19:00.000-08:00

Ok you get this use of unconstructed message "Message Name" . 1) This means what the error message says you are using an unconstucted message in a send shape without creating it 2) You have indeed constucted the message - Biztalk still complains . Do you have parallel actions in your orchestration . Is it possible that you are using the message whihc was consturcted in a parallel shape and

BTS 2004 Flat File Issues

2005-03-28T17:05:00.000-08:00

There are lot of inherent nittygrittys and hack that you need to know when you have Flatfiles with Records and the root node both being ended by CRLF's I did look around quite a bit before I finally came across this link Flat file Schema Tutorial 1 Flat file Schema Tutorial 2and Oh ! to prevent empty nodes from not occuting you need to set Suppres Empty Nodes property to TRUE

Biztalk Explorer Extension

2005-03-22T06:14:00.000-08:00

Wouldnt it be nice to click a DLL and see it's internal schemas and objects contained in a Biztalk DLL , IF you have used ildasm for .net asemblies you know what I am talking about . There is a feature in Biztalk for that , YOu ned to register that dll to get the view in your explorerThe extension is the BtsAsmExt.dll and is located in the \Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\Developer

Monitoring Biztalk performance

2005-03-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

Biztalk applications have now become matured enough and are now getting scrutinized for performance. Often this scrutinizing of results in capturing some key performance counters and you will eventually chose a set of counters to measure and run your tests. But often on later analysis you realize that you missed capturing certain key counters . So what is a good subset to be captured. The

Debatching and Batching in Biztalk 2004

2005-03-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

One of the fairly common issue that most Biztalk designers face is the issue of Debatching and then Batching . Having faced a similar situation myself I must say that there is no best solution for this problme that I have so far come up with . Though there are different solutions that you could employ Just to explain the problem first you have a set of files coming in say a folder ( transport

Accessing Standard Context properties in Biztalk pipelines like FileName

2005-03-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

If you wnated to access context properties in pipelines and have spent needless time figuring out the correct schema for each property here is a comprehensive list This content is taken as is from Stephen Kaufman's WebLogThere are a number of 'built in' promoted properties that provide important information. There are different items for the receive and send pipelines. The 14 receive pipeline

Biztalk Cool stuff

2005-03-02T06:08:00.000-08:00

Some of the good Biztalk cool Stuff available out there BizTalk Server 2004 "deploy with Nant" template Integrating BizTalk Server with Nant BizTalk Server 2004 Pipeline Component Wizard VS.NET addin for quickly building pipeline components BizTalk AutoDeploy Utility VS.NET addin for quickly (re)deploying BizTalk Server solutions. No need for Ant BizTalk Server 2004 Performance Tool Tool that

Biztalk Accelerator for Rosettanet Releases

2005-03-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

Biztalk 2004 Accelerator for Rosettanet released.I have been involved with the accelerator for some time in 2003 so I feel very good personally about this. It was really a great experience working at microsoft although I later moved on from seatlle I think this is the last of the Biztalk 2004 accelerators from MicrosoftThe key features Certified RosettaNet Ready™ RNIF 2.0. Full compliance

Finding Orchestration ID

2005-02-22T05:37:00.000-08:00

Recently I had to do some reporting for which I was not able to use BAM . So i had to write some custom code to track data from promoted properties by populating a seperate DB . One of the interesting problem was to also report the stat of the orchestration. This is possible in BizTalk as each orchestration has a unique Instance ID you can take that out in an expression shape OrchInstGuid =

The QuickStart Guide to Installing & Configuring BizTalk Server 2004 for Windows Server 2003

2005-02-21T12:54:00.000-08:00

There was lot of times when I wanted a good documentation for installign Biztalk and I feel the Installation guide but every other minute you eil be downloading some service pack or the other . this is one concrete place where everything is listedThe QuickStart Guide to Installing & Configuring BizTalk Server 2004 for Windows Server 2003

BizTalk Feed

2005-02-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

I like this feed linkBizTalk FeedThis has some great tips and great links

Biztalk 2004 pipeline components

2005-02-17T13:54:00.000-08:00

If you are thinking of writing a Custom BTS 2004 pipeline component . This would be my number on recommended article written by Christof It goes ito how to promote properties from inside your pipeline ;It discusses why your component needs to be streamed and some of those nifty things; that you tend to forget and even if you have written one before I still think this is a good read.

Biztalk 2004 Partner Competency Exam Training Guide

2005-02-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

Biztalk 2004 Partner Competency Exam Training Guide was released .Grab it hereSo my next plan should be to see if can put myself through the certification engine. I have never done this certifiaction thing . IT certification value is largely at Debate mostly due to issue with dumps. How do you feel about certifications . I would like to hear your opinionabhilashms2--AT--GMAIL-NOSP@M-DOT-COM

Mini Visual Studio

2005-02-17T06:48:00.000-08:00

Ever waited like a minute or so for Visual studio to load up and all you wanted to do was to test out some small console code to prove a concept, I am sure most of us have . and If you have you are gonna love this Snippet compiler That reminds me while I was working in Redmond I have seen a stripped down verson of the IDE called RASCAL . I am not able to find any link to that now

Explaining Biztalk to your Grandma

2005-02-16T07:27:00.000-08:00

I have heard this was apopular question at MSFT interviews "How do you sell excel to your grandmother ?" well No this blog is not about that but then this blog is about how to explain Biztalk to a Business Analyst.One who is not so comfortable with all the geeky terms that we are so used to . I recently had to do one of these myself and I had to kind of get creative with ti . So thought I would

HAT and Biztalk Debugging

2005-02-16T06:31:00.000-08:00

Biztalk Server 2004 follows a Hub-Bus hybrid model and why it is a better model is because it takes the best of each of these individual styles namely Scaling out , throughput and golden copy of data( Centralized data store ) . Every message gets tored in the messagebox . This is how Biztalk achieves Statelessness. This is one of the reason why the Debugging tool ( HAT) is like the way it is .

Biztalk 2004

2005-02-16T05:59:00.000-08:00

It has been sometime since I started working with Biztalk and I have been thinking about blogging for quite sometime well quite a long time actually . I am not new to blogging. But I kind of thought of separating the tech stuff apart, I just wanted to get started So there.. That's it my first Post