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I recently told something about testing and BizTalk for the BizTalk User Group and wrote an article about this subject (Dutch). Material will be online soon...
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I thought NDoc was great, this (http://www.blueonionsoftware.com/Blog.aspx?p=ca36e092-4671-49ca-9af5-5de2e0f6dc72) is even better!!
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A really helpful tool to see whether Best Practices are applied to your BizTalk solution.
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In a BizTalk HTTP messaging scenario, it's fairly common to have one port that receives all message types. Depending on the message type (and perhaps some other properties) messages are routed to different destinations. You can implement the same pattern with the SOAP adapter. Have a look at Richard's blog for a complete description.
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A lot of guessing and many new questions in this good article by Tomas Restrepo on the future of BizTalk / WCF / WF.
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At highschool I had to write a java application that showed the dragon curve fractal. I liked the assignment at the time because of the power of recursion. I wrote a simple .NET app that does the same. Download here
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Most people working with BizTalk have heard of property promotion, in fact property promotion is very important in CBR messaging scenarios. Property promotion makes it possible to route messages based on their content. In short, property promotion is taking information from the message and putting it in the context of a message.
Have you ever heard of property DEmotion?? This is the opposite of property PROmotion, so taking information from the context and putting it in the message. This might become handy when you for instance need the initial filename of message. This information is stored in the context, to be more specific in the element ReceivedFileName in the schema FILE.bts_file_properties in the referenced assembly Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas. How do you get this value in your output message (demotion is done in the send port - use the XMLTransmit pipeline)?
- Right-click the element in your schema you want to contain the ReceivedFileName value and click Promote -> Show Promotions.
- Add a new property schema: choose <your schema project> -> References -> Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas -> Schemas -> FILE.bts_file_properties
- Choose a proper prefix e.g. btsFileProps or something, I think ns0 is dirty
- Add your element and bind it to <your prefix>:ReceivedFileName and click ok
Deploy your schema and test it - your output message should contain the ReceivedFileName property value if your input message has left the element to be filled empty. Questions? Feel free to ask!
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I really like the magazines (issue 1, issue 2) on the BizTalk Hotrod website. Both the website and the articles so far contain very good and readable information on new BizTalk technologies.
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Have a look at this. AMQP is a messaging standard that looks very powerful. I wonder when a .NET / BizTalk implemention will be available.
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It's not recommended, but sometimes you dont have a choice to use schemas without namespaces. BizTalk deals with the schemas very well, just be aware that the BTS.MessageType used in the filter will be only the rootnode, not #RootNode.
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I'm working on a new version of the BizTalk Software Factory, enhancing the old version with functionality to create pipeline components. Futher on, the new version will contain a DSL for creating CBR solutions. Future plans are to include functionality for creating application adapters and BizTalk adapters.
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When you're working with an Guidance Automation Project and you have template for lets say, a class library project that contains the file properties\assemblyinfo.cs, make sure you set the build action to "Content" instead of "Compile", or else you'll get an error message saying there are duplicate attributes in AssemblyInfo.cs. You get the error because the GA project itself also contains an AssemblyInfo.cs file.
P.S. Don't forget to set the "Copy To Output Directory" to "Copy if newer" for obvious reasons...
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With the coming of native EDI support in BizTalk 2006 R2, many people thought Covast would not be involved in creating EDI solutions with BizTalk. Well, that's not what's going to happen. Covast adds the very specific standards, like EDIG@S, ODETTE and EDINE. Moreover, Covast adds a nice B2B appliance called BBOT...nice! Have a look at the article.
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When testing your software, do you hit every line of code? Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but how can you make sure you do? Check out this tool, it'll show you the level of coverage of your code.
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Many developers use this great BizTalk Documenter tool to create a CHM report describing their BizTalk configuration. Just a quick tip: when you get the error message "Unable to locate the help compiler executable", go download the HTML Help Workshop compiler here and install it. When you don't install the workshop in the default folder (C:\Program Files\HTML Help Workshop), change the line
<add key="HelpCompilerLocation" value="C:\Program Files\HTML Help Workshop\hhc.exe" />
in the config file (Microsoft.Sdc.BiztalkDocumenter.exe.config) of the BizTalk Documenter, so that it reflects the proper location of hhc.exe