Author Archives: Hai Ning

UnzipDisassembler

By Hai Ning | December 20, 2006

I came across an article on CodeProject about creating a custom pipeline component for dissassembling incoming messages in zip formats. Even though it is implemented in 2004 version, it is still valid for 2006. It articulates well on how the custom pipeline is constructed in C# and how it can be deployed to a BizTalk [...]

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Distinguished Fields vs. Property Fields

By Hai Ning | December 20, 2006

One of the vexing problems when designing XML schemas for a BizTalk solution is to decide whether to promote a distinguished field or a property field. You can do both types of promotion using the Promote Property dialog box in BizTalk Schema Editor, but which one do you need?
Well, generally speaking, distinguished fields can only [...]

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Programmatically Creating A New Message in BizTalk Pipeline Component

By Hai Ning | November 21, 2006

In the BizTalk Pipeline component, often times you need to construct new messages out of the received messages in the Disassemble stage before passing them on to the orchestration. This can be done in a few different ways.
The easiest way is to build a concatenated XML string using StringBuilder or something similar, and load it [...]

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View Orchestration in C#

By Hai Ning | November 7, 2006

BizTalk Orchestration Designer is the core tool for laying out components representing business processes, and connecting them with logic operations when designing BizTalk applications in Visual Studio. Behind the scene, the XLANG compiler actually generates C# source code before compiling it into .NET assemblies. If you ever want to look under the hood and view [...]

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Tutorial Updates

By Hai Ning | September 15, 2006

If you are pulling your hair out wondering why you followed the tutorial to the letter and yet things aren’t working as it should be, here is Lisa’s Blog site that provides the latest updates to the tutorial. Please make sure you download the latest tutorial from MSDN site instead of using the out-of-dated one [...]

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BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer

By Hai Ning | September 15, 2006

Download
This tool examines a BizTalk Server 2006 deployment and generates a list of best practices issues it discovers. I haven’t tried, but it should be very useful if it works as advertised.

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RSS Bandit & w.bloggar

By Hai Ning | September 7, 2006

If you want use a desktop tool to read and publish blogs, I highly recommend the follwing tools.
RSS Bandit, a very neat blog reading tool. It is open-source and written in C#.
w.bloggar, a very popular blog authoring tool. It can be launched standalone, or from RSS Bandit context menu. I am creating this post using [...]

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