BizTalk 2004

101 of 203 | The truth about large message support in BizTalk 2004 - When BizTalk 2004 was launched, Microsoft announced that it supported large messages (into GB`s). It was important to them because they broke the 4 MB limit that previous versions had. What wasn`t very clear, is that this statement is mainly about the fact that they use streaming to handle incoming messages. Which also means that scenario`s that can`t be solved by streaming still might (or will) have issues. The BizTalk Core Engine Team therefore published an very informational article about scenario`s that might not work with large messages, with details about the reasons for these problems. A must read for any BizTalker that expects to do large message handling someday. Main takeway for ......

102 of 203 | What do IBF 1.5 and BizTalk have in common - Version 1.5 of the Information Bridge Framework (IBF) was released last weekend and is available for download from MSDN.I gave it a whirl to get ready for my seminar in Austin on Wednesday and found that the description of one of the new features is a slight understatement. On the download page it says: A few of the improvements you can look forward to in this release are an integrated debugger, integrated XSL transformation capabilityWell, upon further examination, it turns out that the XSL transform capability is in fact the BizTalk 2004 Mapper. It`s installed when you install the new Metadata designer -- free Anyway IBF 1.5 is a huge, huge improvement over 1.0. Big kudos to the IBF team......

103 of 203 | What do IBF 1.5 and BizTalk have in common? - Version 1.5 of the Information Bridge Framework (IBF) was released last weekend and is available for download from MSDN.   I gave it a whirl to get ready for my seminar in Austin on Wednesday and found that the description of one of the new features is a slight understatement. On the download page it says: A few of the improvements you can look forward to in this release are an integrated debugger, integrated XSL transformation capability   Well, upon further examination, it turns out that the XSL transform capability is in fact the BizTalk 2004 Mapper. It's installed when you install the new Metadata designer -- free …   Anyway … IBF 1.5 is a huge, huge improvement over 1.0. Big kudos to ......

104 of 203 | Using XML schemas effectively within the BizTalk 2004 XSD Schema Editor - I was reading this article http://devresource.hp.com/drc/slide_presentations/schemaWSDL/index.jsp and it got me thinking about how I have been designing schemas in BizTalk… Yes I know I can already hear your groans about the “BizTalk XSD schema editor”. Well contrary to popular believe you don’t need to use monolithic structures in BizTalk schema design. From the BizTalk Server 2004 book… p78 – Building Message Specifications – Imports – “Only schemas that are part of the current project may be imported”… I thought I’d take on building the xsd structure described in the above article using Visual Studio armed with only the BizTalk Editor and the XML Schema Editor. TIP For those that don’......

105 of 203 | Using XML schemas effectively within the BizTalk 2004 XSD Schema Editor - I was reading this article http://devresource.hp.com/drc/slide_presentations/schemaWSDL/index.jsp and it got me thinking about how I have been designing schemas in BizTalk… Yes I know I can already hear your groans about the “BizTalk XSD schema editor”. Well contrary to popular believe you don’t need to use monolithic structures in BizTalk schema design. From the BizTalk Server 2004 book… p78 – Building Message Specifications – Imports – “Only schemas that are part of the current project may be imported”… I thought I’d take on building the xsd structure described in the above article using Visual Studio armed with only the BizTalk Editor and the XML Schema Editor. TIP For those that don’......

106 of 203 | Using XML schemas effectively within the BizTalk 2004 XSD Schema Editor - I was reading this article http://devresource.hp.com/drc/slide_presentations/schemaWSDL/index.jsp and it got me thinking about how I have been designing schemas in BizTalk… Yes I know I can already hear your groans about the “BizTalk XSD schema editor”. Well contrary to popular believe you don’t need to use monolithic structures in BizTalk schema design. From the BizTalk Server 2004 book… p78 – Building Message Specifications – Imports – “Only schemas that are part of the current project may be imported”… I thought I’d take on building the xsd structure described in the above article using Visual Studio armed with only the BizTalk Editor and the XML Schema Editor. TIP For those that don’......

107 of 203 | Using XML schemas effectively within the BizTalk 2004 XSD Schema Editor - I was reading this article http://devresource.hp.com/drc/slide_presentations/schemaWSDL/index.jsp and it got me thinking about how I have been designing schemas in BizTalk… Yes I know I can already hear your groans about the “BizTalk XSD schema editor”. Well contrary to popular believe you don’t need to use monolithic structures in BizTalk schema design. From the BizTalk Server 2004 book… p78 – Building Message Specifications – Imports – “Only schemas that are part of the current project may be imported”… I thought I’d take on building the xsd structure described in the above article using Visual Studio armed with only the BizTalk Editor and the XML Schema Editor. TIP For those that don’......

108 of 203 | Convoy Virtual Subscription Viewer for BizTalk 2004 - I have talked a lot in the past about Convoys.  But, under the covers what really makes Convoy message processing different  What makes a Convoy a Convoy    To sum it all up into one sentence: Convoys require database level message-to-Orchestration correlation independent of any running Orchestration instances.    Is this confusing  Yes.  But trust me, more detailed information is coming soon on this topic.  For now, I want to briefly go over the basic internals of how Convoys work in BizTalk Server 2004.   When you deploy an Orchestration: The presence of a Convoy is detected at the time a BizTalk 2004 Orchestration is enlisted.  At this point, an entry is inserted into the ConvoySets ta......

109 of 203 | Mapping Many Messages to One Inside the Mapper in BizTalk 2004 - This is a cool feature of BizTalk 2004!  It allows you to map many documents into one or map one document into many.  In either case, your inputs will not equal your outputs.  This type of mapping does require some up front planning and careful consideration.   First off, this type of mapping is only allowed inside the Orchestration.  Basically, what the mapper does is creates a kind of multi-part message for either the input, output, or both.  The parts of the multi-part message are the different input/output messages.  This allows the mapper to take in or produce multiple messages.   I have only been able to create these types of maps by creating new maps using the Transform Shape inside......

110 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Exam Preparation Guide (74-135) - Microsoft has released the preparation guide for the BizTalk Server 2004 exam. It looks like it covers a broad spectrum of the product, so there’s quite a lot to learn. I plan to have a go at it pretty soon, but I have quite a bit to get through yet. Christof Claessans has passed, any others  ...

111 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 - BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 came out today… http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspxdisplaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d I`m in the process of installing it on a VM at the moment. Nigel...

112 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 - BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 came out today… http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspxdisplaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d I`m in the process of installing it on a VM at the moment. Nigel...

113 of 203 | Suppressing Nodes Inside the Mapper in BizTalk 2004 - Recently on a project I was required to filter out single records from a large batch that were not required to be processed inside the business process.  In this case, the vast majority of the thousands of input records would not be required in the Orchestration.   Rather the load the whole document into the Orchestration or break the document up into single messages, I decided to just suppress the non-required nodes in the mapper.  This would greatly reduce the number of input records into the system.   The mapper in BizTalk 2004 makes it easy to suppress nodes inside the mapper.  The key is to send the looping node a “false” from a Logical Functoid.  I have tried sending a Boolean False v......

114 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 SP1 Now Available - The long awaited Service Pack 1 for BizTalk 2004 is now available.   Get some more details on Scott’s Blog.   Go directly to the Microsoft Download Site....

115 of 203 | Download BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 today! - BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 was released today. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspxdisplaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d....

116 of 203 | Download BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 today! - BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 was released today. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspxdisplaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d....

117 of 203 | Download BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 today! - BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 was released today. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspxdisplaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d....

118 of 203 | Download BizTalk 2004 Service Pack 1 today! - BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 was released today. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspxdisplaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d....

119 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Exam 074-135 Now Available - The BizTalk 2004 Exam is now available!    The exam number is 074-135: Developing E-Business Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 (English).    Get some more details on Scott’s Blog.   Best of luck!   PS: Sorry for the long delay in posting.  More content and samples are coming soon!...

120 of 203 | First Post - Hello - My Name is Stuart Evans and I am a BizTalk and C# .Net developer and consultant. I run my own business offering development and consultancy services. I am an MCAD and I`ve been working with a range of Microsoft Products since 1999. In my relatively short time in this field (in comparison to many of the other more distinguished bloggers), I`ve been lucky enough to get into working with BizTalk 2004 and C# and have learned some valuable lessons which I`ll do my best to share with you over time. I hope you find my blog of use. ...

121 of 203 | First Post - Hello!! - My Name is Stuart Evans and I am a BizTalk and C# .Net developer and Consultant. I run my own business offering development and consultancy solutions to end customers.  I am an MCAD and I`ve been working with a range of Microsoft Products since 1999, but really have to admit I`ve only become a technical "geek" over the last three years. In my relatively short time in this field (in comparison to many of the other more distinguished bloggers), I`ve been lucky enough to get into working heavily with BizTalk 2004 and C# and have learned from some great people. I feel I have gained some valuable exposure and want to start sharing my experiences with the community. As far as "geekness" goes...........

122 of 203 | Parallel actions, exceptions, and timeouts... - BizTalk 2004 has some very useful behavior around parallel execution and scope-level timeouts that it is helpful to have a good understanding of.   What follows is a series of experiments & associated findings that should shed some light on this area.   Experiment One:    One restriction when using the parallel shape is that if multiple branches make use of a given orchestration variable, you can get a compiler error: error X2226: `someVar`: if shared data is updated in a parallel then all references in every task must be in a synchronized or......

123 of 203 | Parallel actions, exceptions, and timeouts... - BizTalk 2004 has some very useful behavior around parallel execution and scope-level timeouts that it is helpful to have a good understanding of. What follows is a series of experiments & associated findings that should shed some light on this area. Experiment One:  One restriction when using the parallel shape is that if multiple branches make use of a given orchestration variable, you can get a compiler error: error X2226: 'someVar': if shared data is updated in a parallel then all references in every task must be in a synchronized or atomic scope In the experiment below, we are accesing ‘someVar’ in both parallel branches - each w......

124 of 203 | Debugging Routing Failures - Okay, I disappeared for a while. There is this crazy thing called "work" which my bosses (for those of you who are confused, Scott Woodgate is not my boss :) seem to think I need to do sometimes. Some positive news is that BizTalk 2004 SP1 should be released early next year which is a great thing. When it comes out, I recommend getting it, running it through your test environments and then plopping it into your systems. There are some good things done here and I have seen it improve some performance scenarios up to 10% (although I don`t gaurantee any of that just consider it another way for me to make you more likely to try it out :). We are definitely trying.   In other news, it looks like......

125 of 203 | Debugging Routing Failures - Okay, I disappeared for a while. There is this crazy thing called "work" which my bosses (for those of you who are confused, Scott Woodgate is not my boss :) seem to think I need to do sometimes. Some positive news is that BizTalk 2004 SP1 should be released early next year which is a great thing. When it comes out, I recommend getting it, running it through your test environments and then plopping it into your systems. There are some good things done here and I have seen it improve some performance scenarios up to 10% (although I don`t gaurantee any of that just consider it another way for me to make you more likely to try it out :). We are definitely trying.   In other news, it looks like......

126 of 203 | Flat File Disassembler Output Options in BizTalk 2004 - I have seen a lot of posts on various news groups over the past few months about the Flat File Dissembler and how it produces output.  I think it is rather confusing so I put together a sample that I hope will shed some light on the subject.   Download: Flat File Disassembler Output Sample   The Flat File Disassembler is used to convert flat file documents (either positional, delimited, or a supported combination) into XML based on a defined schema.  The schema must import the Flat File Schema Extensions and have all the required delimiters and positions set, of course.  Flashback: This type of conversion was accomplished using envelops in BizTalk 2002.   The Flat File Disassembler can take......

127 of 203 | BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed - 4 Free Chapters - At last! Scott`s book made it to press. More people have been waiting for this than for the next Harry Potter. There`s four free chapters available for download. Very generous od Sams I think. (As I`m living in Sweden, I`m still waiting for it to become available over here.) Nice to see the second book on BizTalk 2004 finally unleashed ;-), nice one Scott and the team... Chapter 3 - Building Message Specifications is here: http://www.samspublishing.com/title/0672325985 Chapter 7 - Working with AdaptersChapter 10 - Orchestrating Web Services and CorrelationChapter 11 - Developing Rules http://www.theserverside.net/books/sams/BizTalkUnleashed/index.tss(Free reg required)....

128 of 203 | A goldmine of useful BizTalk Widgets - I kind of knew there was some BizTalk stuff up on GotDotNet but never realised how much.  If youre doing anything with BizTalk 2004 check them out as they could save you a lot of time and stress!! Just got to find some time to put some of my own stuff up there, and blog some more of course ;-)...

129 of 203 | A goldmine of useful BizTalk Widgets - I kind of knew there was some BizTalk stuff up on GotDotNet but never realised how much.  If youre doing anything with BizTalk 2004 check them out as they could save you a lot of time and stress!! Just got to find some time to put some of my own stuff up there, and blog some more of course ;-)...

130 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Performance - Ive been involved in a number of BizTalk 2004 Performance / Tuning engagements recently, it seems that most of this year customers have been busy writing solutions using BizTalk and are now getting to the point of deploying hence its been really busy here! On the whole BizTalk has worked really well; there is of course the usual gotchas and seemingly infinite number of configuration tweaks you can make which either makes things better or worse J   A few things common things have come out of this works. Disk Configuration The first and most common is the Disk Configuration on the SQL Server hosting the BizTalk MessageBox.  Typically customers test on standard IDE hard-drives or more common......

131 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Performance - Ive been involved in a number of BizTalk 2004 Performance / Tuning engagements recently, it seems that most of this year customers have been busy writing solutions using BizTalk and are now getting to the point of deploying hence its been really busy here! On the whole BizTalk has worked really well; there is of course the usual gotchas and seemingly infinite number of configuration tweaks you can make which either makes things better or worse J   A few things common things have come out of this works. Disk Configuration The first and most common is the Disk Configuration on the SQL Server hosting the BizTalk MessageBox.  Typically customers test on standard IDE hard-drives or more common......

132 of 203 | New Domain Name / Welcome back - So its been a while that i was posting on this blog. First of all I wanna mention that our blog name is changed to www.blogginabout.net thanks to Dennis van der Stelt. Great work !!! In the couple of days I wanna give u an overview of all the good work we did with BizTalk Server 2004 :)) So many projects so much joy and work. Also I give u all the nice stuff the BizTalk Bloggers were doing and my experiences of the last year. My last blog was in May so I will keep u updates of all the cool projects we did. BizTalk 2004 Rules !!  ...

133 of 203 | Another round of BizTalk naming conventions - Some time ago, I published a set of proposed naming conventions for BizTalk 2004.   In the interim, I’ve had a chance to see these used in a few different projects and to review them with several people -- and they have evolved & grown a fair bit.   So I thought I’d publish the new version - the Word version can be found here, and an HTML version can be found here.  (I’ve found it helpful to open the HTML version directly in VS.NET for quick reference.) Hopefully these will be of value to your project.  I’ve certainly found that the documentation value to be had within Orchestr......

134 of 203 | Another round of BizTalk naming conventions - Some time ago, I published a set of proposed naming conventions for BizTalk 2004.   In the interim, I’ve had a chance to see these used in a few different projects and to review them with several people -- and they have evolved & grown a fair bit.   So I thought I’d publish the new version - the Word version can be found here, and an HTML version can be found here.  (I’ve found it helpful to open the HTML version directly in VS.NET for quick reference.) Hopefully these will be of value to your project.  I’ve certainly found that the documentation value to be had within Orchestrations and within the operational too......

135 of 203 | HDC 2004 Wrap-up - I had the pleasure of presenting on BizTalk 2004 at the Heartland Developer’s Conference 2004.  The whole conference was a lot of fun, and as Kent Tegels has noted, Joe Olsen did a great job in organizing the logistics for this event – you wouldn’t have known it was the first-of-a-kind (save for Joe’s mea culpa on caffeine…) I had a chance to talk to Sam Gentile about the work he has been doing at Addesso.  This was enlightening, since in my non-BizTalk-work-life I do quite a bit mobile work in the field-force-automation space (using ruggedized Pocket PC devices – great fun!) As to the presentation itself......

136 of 203 | Update: RPC/encoded still doesn't work with the October CTP bits. - I got brave/curious/stupid/desperate after getting BizTalk to call an RPC/encoded Web service again and installed the .NET runtime distributed with the October CTP to see if that would be an option to have VS 2005 and BizTalk 2004 on the same box.   The answer is:NOPE!!!   Now BizTalk is hanging again when processing an RPC/encoded response from a web service. I surely hope that the .NET Runtime team and the BizTalk team get together before Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 and hash this one out.   The whole side-by-side concept would be really great if the entire world was running .NET. Since even Microsoft's own applications don't seem to be able to get it right, how should 3rd party developers b......

137 of 203 | Update: RPC/encoded still doesn`t work with the October CTP bits. - I got brave/curious/stupid/desperate after getting BizTalk to call an RPC/encoded Web service again and installed the .NET runtime distributed with the October CTP to see if that would be an option to have VS 2005 and BizTalk 2004 on the same box.The answer is:NOPE!!!Now BizTalk is hanging again when processing an RPC/encoded response from a web service. I surely hope that the .NET Runtime team and the BizTalk team get together before Visual Studio 2005beta 2 and hash this one out.The whole side-by-side concept would be really great if the entire world was running .NET. Since even Microsoft`sownapplications don`t seem to be able to get it right, how should 3rd party developers be able to do......

138 of 203 | XLANGs.BTEngine.BTXTimerMessages Delivered, Not Consumed in BizTalk 2004 - What  How  When  Why  Useless  You have no clue what I am talking about   What are BTXTimerMessages They are messages BizTalk uses internally to control timers.  This includes the delay shape and scope shapes with timeouts.    How will you see BTXTimerMessage You will see these messages in HAT.  They will be associated with running Orchestations.  If they show up, they will be in the Delivered, Not Consumed (zombie) message status.   When will you see BTXTimerMessages I see these messages when I am working with parallel actions, atomic scope, and convoys.  My sample, Limit Running Orchestrations, produces these types of message.  I have not been able to pin point the exact shapes or action......

139 of 203 | Using test driven assemblies inside transformations *BizTalk 2004 Sample* - Nikolai a colleague of mine at Intergen is a huge advocate for “Test  Driven” development using nunit .   He has been using a technique which includes wrapping unit tests around methods written in C# assemblies that called from within the mapper in BizTalk.   An example of a method that you might like to use in an assembly is to convert from one DateTime format to another e.g.   public string convertDateTimeFormat(string dateIn, string dateInPattern, string dateOutPattern) { string dateOut = null;          try        {               DateTime d = DateTime.ParseExact(dateIn,dateInPattern,new DateTimeFormatInfo(),DateTimeStyles.AllowWhiteSpaces);               dateOut = d.ToString(dateOutPa......

140 of 203 | Using test driven assemblies inside transformations *BizTalk 2004 Sample* - Nikolai a colleague of mine at Intergen is a huge advocate for “Test  Driven” development using nunit .   He has been using a technique which includes wrapping unit tests around methods written in C# assemblies that called from within the mapper in BizTalk.   An example of a method that you might like to use in an assembly is to convert from one DateTime format to another e.g.   public string convertDateTimeFormat(string dateIn, string dateInPattern, string dateOutPattern) { string dateOut = null;          try        {               DateTime d = DateTime.ParseExact(dateIn,dateInPattern,new DateTimeFormatInfo(),DateTimeStyles.AllowWhiteSpaces);               dateOut = d.ToString(dateOutPa......

141 of 203 | Concurrent Receive Convoys (Parallel Convoys) in BizTalk 2004 - In the past, I have tended to focus on sequential convoys.  Now, I decided to take a look at Concurrent Convoys.  First off, I was sure in older versions of the documentation they were called Parallel Convoys  Maybe I’m mistaken or maybe the name changed over the past few months….  In any case, I will get with the times and call them Concurrent Convoys.  No matter what you call them, the power and usefulness of this type of convoy is the same.   Why use Concurrent Convoys  Concurrent convoys allow you to receive multiple items in any order that all need to be processed by the same Orchestration before the next step in the process can happen.  Setting up and using a Concurrent Convoy is rat......

142 of 203 | BizTalk 2004: New version of the Bloggers` Guide to BizTalk - Congratulations to Alan Smith for publishing the November edition of the Bloggers` Guide to BizTalk.   There are several new contributers, and lots of new material.   I was surprised at just how extensive the information in this digest is becoming, after only the first update.   Excellent stuff....

143 of 203 | BizTalk 2004: New version of the Bloggers` Guide to BizTalk - Congratulations to Alan Smith for publishing the November edition of the Bloggers` Guide to BizTalk.   There are several new contributers, and lots of new material.   I was surprised at just how extensive the information in this digest is becoming, after only the first update.   Excellent stuff....

144 of 203 | Administrating multiple BizTalk 2004 environments from a single machine / Remote HAT - It can turn out to be useful to use Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) and the BizTalk Server Administration Console “remotely” (that is, from a machine other than one of the actual servers in the BizTalk group.)  This can be the case if you have multiple environments to administer, and/or using Remote Desktop is not desirable or available. It should be noted that to accomplish this, you technically have to have the “administrating machine” join the BizTalk Group – though since you won’t have any host instances defined on the machine, that isn’t as significant as it sounds.  You are essentially just configuring the ma......

145 of 203 | Creating Nodes from Flat Data in BizTalk 2004 Maps - It can sometimes be challenging when mapping schemas in BizTalk 2004.  One common problem is when the inbound document has one record and the source creates multiple records based on the data inside your single record.   The root problem arises because you have nothing to loop around in the inbound document and need to create multiple nodes on the output.   How can this be handled in the mapper   Two ways: Functoids or XSLT Template   BizTalk 2004 introduces a new Functoid just for this situation.  It is called the Table Looping Functoid.  It is accompanied by the Table Looping Functoid Data Extractor.  The table looping functoid will take a flat row of data and produce multiple nodes of d......

146 of 203 | Interesting "gotcha" when working with xs:date fields in BizTalk 2004 - I was working with a schema this week that had an type in it. I loaded the schema into BizTalk and set the field to be a distinguished property. When accessing the property I noticed that it had converted the xs:date property to a System.DateTime type. What had happened was that the date had been converted to UTC format behind the scenes; From the bizTalk docs (If the datetime format does not specify time zone or UTC format, the time is assumed to be local and is converted to UTC based on the current time zone.) e.g. Say the date that was passed in was ‘2004-10-26’ when I accessed it by the distinguished property it’s value was ‘2004-10-25 11:00:00’ (UTC-13) - New Zealand timezone… theref......

147 of 203 | Interesting "gotcha" when working with xs:date fields in BizTalk 2004 - I was working with a schema this week that had an type in it. I loaded the schema into BizTalk and set the field to be a distinguished property. When accessing the property I noticed that it had converted the xs:date property to a System.DateTime type. What had happened was that the date had been converted to UTC format behind the scenes; From the bizTalk docs (If the datetime format does not specify time zone or UTC format, the time is assumed to be local and is converted to UTC based on the current time zone.) e.g. Say the date that was passed in was ‘2004-10-26’ when I accessed it by the distinguished property it’s value was ‘2004-10-25 11:00:00’ (UTC-13) - New Zealand timezone… theref......

148 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Enterprise Integration Patterns... - A couple of excellent resources, that I am now using to help document integration architectures: Integration Patterns with BizTalk Server 2004 - http://www.eaipatterns.com/docs/integrationpatterns_biztalk.pdf Test-Driven Development in Integration Projects - http://www.eaipatterns.com/docs/TestDrivenEAI.pdf ...

149 of 203 | BizTalk 2004 Enterprise Integration Patterns... - A couple of excellent resources, that I am now using to help document integration architectures: Integration Patterns with BizTalk Server 2004 - http://www.eaipatterns.com/docs/integrationpatterns_biztalk.pdf Test-Driven Development in Integration Projects - http://www.eaipatterns.com/docs/TestDrivenEAI.pdf ...

150 of 203 | XPath Inside Orchestrations in BizTalk 2004 - Working with XPath inside Orchestrations is a powerful and simple feature of BizTalk 2004.  The help guide does a good job describing the process (under Using XPath in Message Assignment).   I have found that the XPath queries can only be done against a Message and the results can be set to a Message, XML Document or other orchestration variables.  XPath queries can also be executed against untyped messages.  That is, a Message that is of type System.Xml.XmlDocument.   CRITICAL: BizTalk xpath can be used to both read values and set values inside your Message.  To set values in your message, you need to be inside a Message Construct shape.   Here are some of the things you can do with xpath ......