Biztalk 2004/2006

BiztalkWscfClient for Biztalk 2006 is out

Molnar Tibor — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:42:00 GMT

BiztalkWscfClient for Biztalk 2006 is out! The tutorial (http://geekswithblogs.net/mtex/articles/68630.aspx) and tool description (http://geekswithblogs.net/mtex/articles/68626.aspx) are updated. The new version can be downloaded from http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=7762029C-D865-4A7C-8DB2-33B76CB52891.

The first version got 525 downloads till now. I hope the new one will have at least the same number.

As always, I'm waiting for you feedback.

How's going with BiztalkWscfClient

Molnar Tibor — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 07:38:00 GMT

The tool has 280 downloads in 18 days from the gotdotnet site, which is okay considering that is related to specific development scenario.
What would make me really happy to receive feedbacks on this blog, the web services contract first and Biztalk are so exiting! Anyway I wrote to some big names in the Biztalk area, some of them responded, and Rod da Silva asked me if I have this tool for Visual Studio 2006 / Biztalk 2006. I don't have it but, I just started to do it considering that what I was waiting for just happened today: Wscf 0.6 for .Net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 was released! You can get it from http://www.thinktecture.com/WSCF.

So if you are interested in BiztalkWscfClient on Biztalk 2006, stay tuned, is coming soon.

The BiztalkWscfClient tool

Molnar Tibor — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 22:46:00 GMT

Think about the situation when the web service referenced by a Biztalk Server Project was created with the contract first approach: first the messages were defined using different complex schemas referencing one another, then the wsdl file was generated, then the implementation classes were created based on the wsdl file. What could happen is that the schemas created by Visual Studio (and used as message types in the web port type definition) during adding the web reference are slighlty different then the original schemas. For example 'xs:restriction' and 'xs:all' will be replaced with the base type of the restriction (xs:string for example) respectivelly with 'xs:sequence', the 'maxoccures' attribute value other then 'unbounded' will be replaced with 'unbounded'.

Sometimes this can be annoying, the messages built up by Biztalk might be not valid after calling a web service because of the rules defined during the messages schemas definition and ignored by Biztalk because of loosing some of those rules during adding the web reference.

Another problem can be that the types defined in the xml schemas can be duplicated between two or more web references.

Solution: create a schema repository in a Biztalk project with the exact schemas created at the beginning of the consumed web services development and generate our web port types using as message types directly the types defined in those schemas. This way the problems presented above will be solved.

How: use the Visual Studio addon developed by me, BiztalkWscfClient. The detailed descripton of the tool can be found here. The tutorial can be found here.

If you have any feedback, don't hesitate to give it. If you will use this tool, I would be happy to do enhancement requests and bugfixes.