All posts by : get on the bus

1 of 14 | The maligned Distinguished Field or why Distinguished Fields are cool - (This article was first published in BizTalk Hotrod) The Distinguished Field is often seen as the weaker of the two types of Fields when handling Fields in BizTalk. After all, the Distinguished Field can't be used as a filter on a message, and it's slower than its big brother the Promoted Field. Well, today I'm here to dispel the myth of the wimpy Distinguished Field and place in the pantheon of power that equals, and in some ways exceeds the Promoted Field. MYTH: Getting the value of a Distinguished Field requires loading the entire message into memory. The first myth that we need to dispel is that the Promoted Field is a quicker field to access than the Distinguished Field. Th......

2 of 14 | Using WCF LOB Adapters with the Neuron ESB - WCF LOB Adapters are a new technology for integration with back-end systems and applications. WCF LOB adapters will supersede the BizTalk Adapter Framework. If you're running an ESB powered by Neuron, you can use these adapters too. Here's how to configure your bus to talk to a back end system using a WCF LOB adapter. Step 1: Add a New Binding Step 1 is to define a new binding to Neuron. A WCF LOB adapter is exposed to consumers as a new transport binding. Launch the ESB Explorer, go to the Services > Bindings area, and click New to add a new binding. Click the Browse button and navigate to the WFC LOB adapter assembly you want to support. The ESB Explorer will automaica......

3 of 14 | What I would like to see in the HL7 Accelerator 3.0! - List of enhancements to the HL7 Accelerator experience in BizTalk Server. The BizTalk HL7 Accelerator (BTAHL7) is non-compliant with the HL7 2.4 (and 2.3.1) Specification 2.10 in the following manners: Step 1 Message Construction (serialization): b.2 if the [field] value is not present, no further characters are required b.5.iv components that are not present at the end of a field need not be represented by component separators b.6.iv subcomponents that are not present at the end of a component need not be represented by subcomponent separators In all of the above cases, the requirement is that the object with no value does not require a delimiter for it, but is certainly gives the im......

4 of 14 | Security Wizard - Understanding BizTalk Server 2006 Security – Blog Entry - Security in BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006 is complicated to understand. This simplifies the security into one simple view....(read more)...

5 of 14 | Checking for the existence of a property in a BizTalk Server 2006 Message – Blog Entry - NOTE: The variable PropExists as bool has been already created The Property of interest is BTS.RetryCount The Message is Message_In      The list from Using Operators in Expressions (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561847.aspx) has the typical list of stuff that you expect in C#, multiplication, bit operations (shift left and right) and Boolean operators, but a couple of extremely useful constructs are available that are unique to BizTalk. The most important of these (in my humble opinion) is the exists operator.      As you are all aware, to even check whether a property exists in an expression throws an exception… as in the following case: PropExists = (Message......

6 of 14 | Handling Trailing Delimiters in HL7 Messages with BizTalk Server 2006 – Blog Entry - Applies to: BizTalk Server 2006 with the HL7 1.3 Accelerator Outline of the problem Trailing Delimiters are empty values at the end of an object in a HL7 ER7 formatted message. Examples: Empty Field NTE|P| NTE|P|| Empty component ORC|1|725^ Empty Subcomponent ORC|1|||||27& Empty repeat OBR|1||||||||027~ Trailing delimiters indicate the following object exists and is empty, which is quite different from null, null is an explicit value indicated by a pair of double quotes -> " ". The BizTalk HL7 Accelerator by default does not allow trailing delimiters. There are three methods to allow trailing delimiters. NOTE: All Schemas always allow trailing delimit......

7 of 14 | File System permission for the BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006 file adapter – Blog Entry - I'm sure that over time you've run into the dreaded "File transport does not have read/write privileges for receive location "C:\ Flatfile\SAPTestIn\".". Usually you simply go to the folder and either give the BizTalk account full permission (bad) or Everyone full permission (really bad).     So for a production environment, what is the absolute minimum permissions required? For the Receive File Adapter the explicit permission are: NTFS Attribute Property Name DELETE Delete Files FILE_READ_DATA List Folder / Read Data FILE_WRITE_DATA Create Files / Write Data FILE_APPEND_DATA Create Folders / Append Data FILE_READ_EA......

8 of 14 | Storing information for BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006 – a new model is exposed – Blog Entry - I've been reviewing and studying the CrossReferencing APIs because it looks like no one is using them, and I like to find new things to play with.    I got a hint from Marty Wasznicky that they were written for a customer years ago "to provide a way to easily take an inbound value and cross it over to an outbound value."    As I thought about it, I realized that I do this all the time. For example, at a health care provider, I had inbound LabCorp Medical Testing values that had a one-to-one relationship with the electronic medical records (EMR) value. So, I could possibly use this to map values from one system to value to another system. UC1 – Map inbound values to outbound values i......

9 of 14 | Removing DTA (Tracking) Data permanently in BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006 – Blog Entry - To remove data and keep the BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006 healthy you have to enable the BizTalk Backup jobs. This process talks about why and what to do if you do not want to archive tracking data....(read more)...

10 of 14 | Connecting SalesForce notifications WebServices to BizTalk Server 2006 – Blog Entry - At a recent client, the Salesforce developer (Doug Auerbach of Avanade) pointed out that the newest release (What's New in Apex Web Services API Winter '07) has the capability for Salesforce to call external WebServices with Notification messages. You can wire up a large range of events using various rules and use them to generate custom WSDL that, when exposed by your application, Salesforce will call with the data object specified. Tim Dutcher, the Technical Director at Acetta, agreed to pursue the possibility of using this new functionality. In BizTalk Server 2006, we approached the solution from the viewpoint of exposing a BizTalk Orchestration as a WebService that consumed the WSDL ge......

11 of 14 | the new SysInternals site at Microsoft -> New tools! Useful for BizTalk Server 2006 and 2004- Blog Entry - Microsoft has already started incorporating the SysInternals product line into the MS line.    http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx    They have released an update of Procmon Announcing Process Monitor v1.0 We're excited to announce the release of Process Monitor, a system monitoring tool that not only replaces Regmon and Filemon by including file system and registry monitoring, but adds process, thread, and DLL monitoring as well as advanced filtering, event information, and basic data mining capabilities.    I highly recommend it!...

12 of 14 | The New VirtualStream in BizTalk Server 2006 – Blog Entry - I bet you are all drooling over the new VirtualStream support in BizTalk Server 2006. With this, you can access a forward-read only stream as if it was a fully implemented stream with backward and forward access to the data.    The VIrtualStream is implemented in the undocumented API's but is also exposed in the SDK as VirtualStream.cs, so I feel pretty safe in using the deployed version.    But, the use of the VirtualStream is not what this about, this is about the security implications of the VirtualStream. The VS supports a disk caching scheme to store large streams…    As such, this means that the stream size in the cache can be quite large and you _generally_ don't have to wor......

13 of 14 | What Ports does BizTalk Server 2006 or BizTalk Server 2004 require to be open in the firewall? – Blog Entry - Required Ports for BizTalk Server http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/bts06coredocs/html/a11cec7a-de97-47f9-9153-0be82d694fab.asp    Also listing the: Ports for the Receive and Send Servers http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/bts06coredocs/html/19cafe74-6676-4779-8ced-de0841dba19f.asp  Ports for the Administration Server http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/bts06coredocs/html/dc0094b2-5ba2-4b8f-84aa-b6232be358ee.asp  Ports for the Tracking Server http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/bts06coredocs/html/4b4913a4-7d8d-4fd0-a116-ba868c4ad7da.asp    Ports for the Processing Servers http://msdn.microsoft.com/libr......

14 of 14 | Creating an SQL 2005 Server that support BizTalk Server 2006 and SPS... one gotcha! Blog Entry - Create the server with Case-Sensitive collation?      You will get the following error when you attempt to extend a web site with the SPS server: Must declare the scalar variable "@SiteId".    In the BizTalk Installation Guide (Multi server in this example) I found the following note:    If you will be using two namespaces that only vary by case, you must install the BizTalk Server databases with a case-sensitive collation. Examples of case-sensitive collations include binary and non-binary collations with case-sensitivity enabled. If this is not done, schema resolution will fail because XML is always case-sensitive.    So, being the hampered genius that I am, I installed my S......