All posts by : Gilles WebLog

1 of 10 | Date/Time tracked with BAM must be expressed in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) - All date/time tracked by BAM must be expressed in UTC. BAM depends on this to provide accurate durations, among many other things. This is clearly explained here. It was also the case for BizTalk 2004 even if the documentation gave subtle hints instead of describing it: es.UpdateActivity("PurchaseOrder", poid, "POShipped", DateTime.UtcNow); This rule is unfortunately easy to forget. For instance, let's assume you have a message with a date/time field you want to track with BAM. You start...(read more)...

2 of 10 | BAM Portal Activity Search: "This action cannot be performed because one or more database(s) appears corrupted" - When using the BAM Portal Activity Search feature, you may be directed to an error page with the above error message. This error message means that there are instances with duplicate ID in the activity you were searching. If you look at the "Application" event log on the computer which runs the BAM Web Services, you will find one entry from "BAM Web Service" comparable to the following: EXCEPTION:System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: There are instances with duplicate ID 'PO_COMPLETED_100'...(read more)...

3 of 10 | BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer has shipped! - The BizTalk Server 2006 Best Practices Analyzer automatically examines a BizTalk Server 2006 deployment and generate a list of issues pertaining to best practices standards for BizTalk Server deployments. The primary use of this tool is to examine BizTalk Server production and staging environments, though it will still be useful on Dev machines. You can donwload it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en....(read more)...

4 of 10 | BAM Query Service: What is it and how can I use it? - If you have installed BAM (BizTalk Server 2004 or BizTalk Server 2006), you may have noticed that a web service called the "BAM Query Service" got installed. As its name hints, this web service allows the BAM Portal to retrieve BAM instance data without connecting directly to a SQL server. This web service is intended to be called by the BAM Portal only. Therefore, it is not documented and Microsoft will not support code which makes direct calls to this web service. A long time ago, when we designed...(read more)...

5 of 10 | BizTalk Server 2006 runs great under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2! - Today, Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 can be downloaded free of charges. BizTalk Server 2006 works great under Virtual Server 2005 R2. When we were developing BizTalk Server 2006, I ran all tests under Virtual Server and never saw any problem. One caveat: make sure you have plenty of physical memory (I use 2Gb), give your guest operating system at least 1600Mb. Do not remember to install the Virtual Machine additions as soon as possible - this is critical to get Windows Server...(read more)...

6 of 10 | BisTalk Server 2006 Released Today! - You probably know this already. You can find an overview of BizTalk Server 2006 features here. Now that BizTalk 2006 is released, I can speak a little more freely about the product. You can use the "Contact" link to suggest topics you'd like me to shed some light on. I do not promise I'll be able to answer every single question, but I'll do my best....(read more)...

7 of 10 | BizTalk Server Team Product Management has a Blog! - Visit it here. Kris, Steve, Michael and Mark share product updates, links to training materials and even employment opportunities! I subscribed to their RSS feed....(read more)...

8 of 10 | Debugger Visualizer for BizTalk 2006: MessageContext - Visual Studio 2005 added support for Debugger Visualizers. With debugger visualizers, developers can define what information (and in what form) is shown in the debugger for a specific type. There are many visualizers for various .NET types floating around. Here is a small list of the most popular ones: ASP.NET Cache, Regular Expression, XmlDocument (and other Xml related types), a powerful looking DataSet visualizer and there is even a WindowsIdentity visualizer. I am not going to explain in details how to write your own visualizer. You can find step by step instructions on MSDN. Most existing debugger visualizers I mentionned in the previous paragraph also have home pages where ......

9 of 10 | Format of BizTalk 2004 assemblies: How do artifacts get compiled to .NET assemblies - Today, we explore some undocumented (and therefore not supported) internal parts of BizTalk 2004. When a BizTalk project is compiled, artifacts like Messages, Orchestrations, Pipelines, Maps or Schemas (to mention only a few) are compiled into a .NET assembly. In the assembly, one type represents one artifact. These types are most of the time classes and they inherit from a base class that best represent the kind of BizTalk artifact's behavior. For instance, maps inherit from Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.TransformBase while schemas inherit from Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.SchemaBase. These types are defined in Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.dll, available in <BTS Installatio......

10 of 10 | Format of BizTalk 2004 assemblies: Maps - Today, we dive deeply into the undocumented and unsupported bowels of the BizTalk artifacts compiler and examine how maps get compiled to .NET assemblies. The BizTalk 2004 Mapper allows to graphically build a transformation between an XML instance of an input schema to another XML instance conforming to an output schema. Today, we explore some undocumented (and therefore not supported) internal parts of BizTalk 2004. The BizTalk mapper allows complex transformations between fields. On the map below, Field1 in the destination instance is set to Field1 + Field2 from the input schema:   We already know that when a BizTalk project is compiled, Maps are co......