Category Archives: BizTalk

New England BizTalk User Group presentation

I gave a presentation on BizTalk High Availability options to the New England chapter of the BizTalk user Group on May 14th.
Here is a link if you are interested in downloading the presentation (powerpoint 97-2003 format).

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Dynamically Reading Receive Location Context Properties

A situation present itself occur where an orchestration uses a receive port that is sourced by multiple receive locations to receive a message and a specific context property must be read from the incoming message. Because the message is coming from different receive locations, an evaluation of the to location may be necessary to determine [...]

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Import flat file using BizTalk server

Recently I worked with a client to implement a solution to import data from an Excel file to SQL Server database. In order to provide a seamless user experience, we created a web page to allow user to upload file to server, then use BizTalk server to convert Excel file to XML file and call [...]

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Some new BizTalk links

Some interesting links:
BizTalk Server Database Optimization White Paper – This is an excellent MSDN write-up on how to optimize your BizTalk systems. The title is somewhat incorrect as it describes how to optimize the hardware (which RAID level to use, turn off hyperthreading), the Network (usage of subnets), the OS (Registry and other settings) , [...]

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A Custom Functoid – EBCDIC to ASCII

Here is an example of a custom functoid method that converts an EBCDIC signed value to ASCII format:
Add a new C# class library project to your BizTalk solution and call it MyCompany.BizTalk.Functoids. Create a C# class in the project and use the same project name for the namespace.
 Example:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
Â
namespace MyCompany.BizTalk.Functoids
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Summary [...]

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Custom Pipeline Components – part 3: Completing the Archive Component

This post continues the series on creating custom pipeline components. The previous posts in the series can be found here:  post 1,  post 2.
In order to complete the exercise of creating the archive component, we need to add the code to actually perform the archival of the message. For this example, the requirements of the archive component is to persist [...]

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Custom Pipeline Components – part 2: Archive component continued…

In the previous post we started creating the c# class that implements the interfaces needed to develop a custom BizTalk pipeline component. In this post, we continue with this sample…
The next interface we will implement is the IPersistPropertyBag interface. Before we do that, we need to add two generic utility methods to read to & write from [...]

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Custom Pipeline Components – part 1: Getting Started

This is the first post in a series on how to develop custom pipelines and incorporate advanced functionality. The final example will allow the reader to incorporate PGP decryption on the receive sid and encryption on the send ports.
A custom pipeline component is just a plain .NET class that implements several BizTalk interfaces. I [...]

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Passwords & BizTalk

Even with all the time I have spent with BizTalk 2004 and 2006, there is one thing that I will occasionally get tripped on – the fact that exported Bindings and Configuration files do not contain passwords.
For security purposes, BizTalk never shows the existing values of any passwords – whether those passwords are entered during configuration, setting up [...]

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BizTalk Troubleshooting Guide

Microsoft just released a new document to help developers with programming issues within a BizTalk application.
It contains 120 (!) pages of useful info about every aspect of BizTalk – including best practices. Additional info about the document is available here and here.
After scanning it over, I found several topics that are still missing. I guess that’s OK as [...]

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