Two monitors are better than one when it comes to designing Orchestrations!

Shawn Smith has added to the growing pile of questions surrounding transaction handling in BTS 2004

The Throw shape requires an existing exception object, unless you use the 'General Exception mechanism to rethrow a current exception.

BizTalk 2004 supports long-running and atomic transactions within Orchestrations. The model has changed a bit from earlier versions, and atomic transactions are no longer based on DTC transactions by default. This article explains some of the features of transactions, and also speculates about the exact behaviour of 'batched' atomic transactions - a subject that is currently very opaque due to a lack of documentation.

A default installation of WSS installs the service on the default web site and uses wMSDE, even if SQL Server is already installed. Many of us have worked out how to avoid these defaults, but in the hope that the information will be of use to someone out there, here is a brief article detailing a step-by-step approach to using a non-default web site and an existing instance of SQL Server.

Well, it's 18th April, and I am very out of date with this, but I can't resist broadcasting one of the funnier April Fools I have seen for some time - All care of the InfoPath team at Microsoft:

Various BizTalk-related postings

For those who like archaeology, I dug up the XLANG/s preview software from the 2001 PDC and had a quick look.

The latest (April 2004) release of the documentation for BizTalk 2004 directly addresses the issue of sending HTML mail via the SMTP adapter. Although the adapter itself doesn't know anything about HTML mail, you can indeed do this by using the MIME/SMIME encoder in your own send pipeline. However, you also have to know about another slightly obscure feature, which is that you can set a ContentType property on individual parts of a Multi-Part message in orchestration.

XLANG/s is not, in the strictest sense, a new .NET language (i.e., it doesn't compile directly to IL). When you compile a BizTalk Visual Studio project, a whole bunch of temporary C# files are generated for orchestrations, pipelines, messages, schemas, maps, etc. XLANG/s simply scripts the output of the some of this generated source code.

I have seen the future, and the future is Microsoft Virtual Server.

BizTalk 2004's XLANG/s language is syntactically reminiscent of C#, and it is natural to assume that it exhibits similar features. In fact, XLANG/s is very different to C#, providing specific support for process flow, whilst offering only a rudimentary set of features for expressing business logic. This article explains the differences.

Someone asked me a couple of days ago why web references in BizTalk projects use .odx files. Here's the answer.

The built-in schema generation facility in Visual Studio was designed only to support the requirements of ADO.NET. BizTalk Server 2004 provides an alternative.

Quick & dirty workaround for a 'Not a member of Debugger Users' problem in Visual Studio .NET.

A few comments on BizTalk and InfoPath