BizTalk Server 2004/2006
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on the BizTalk Server blog site. This is advanced notice, given that this new version will ship six months after the release of Windows 8, expected in the second half of next year. On this basis, we can expect the new version of BizTalk Server to arrive in 2013. Given the BizTalk team’s previous record of name changes, I wonder if this will eventually be released as BizTalk Server 2013. Microsoft has been refreshingly...
At last, I can announce that ‘BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed’ has been published and is available through major booksellers in both printed and electronic form. The book is not a new edition of the old ‘BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed’ book from several years ago, although Brian Loesgen, our fearless team leader, provided continuity with that title. Instead, this is entirely new content written by a team of six authors, including myself. BizTalk Server is such a huge subject. It proved a challenge to...
One benefit of my recent experience on a BA flight was that I got plenty of time to read through “Microsoft BizTalk 2010 Line of Business Systems Integration”. I’d promised the publisher weeks ago that I would take a look and publish some comments, but August has been such a busy month for me, and they have had to be patient. I should point out that, for the sake of transparency, that with another BizTalk book about to be released (next week) which I helped co-author, I have an urgent and obvious...
Following the previous post, here is a second bit of wisdom. In the Load method of a custom pipeline component, only assign values retrieved from the property bag to your custom properties if the retrieved value is not null. Do not assign any value to a custom property if the retrieved value is null. This is important because of the way in which pipeline property values are loaded at run time. If you assign one or more property values via the Admin Console (e.g., on a pipeline in a Receive Location),...
Here is a small snippet of BizTalk Server wisdom which I will post for posterity. Say you are creating a custom pipeline component with custom properties. You create private fields and a public properties and write all the code to load and save corresponding property bag values from and too your properties. At some point, when you deploy the BizTalk application and test it, you get an exception from within your pipeline stating, unhelpfully, that "Value does not fall within the expected range." Or...
Jesus Rodriguez has blogged recently on Tellago Devlabs' release of an open source RESTful API for BizTalk Server Business Rules. This is an excellent addition to the BizTalk ecosystem and I congratulate Tellago on their work. See http://weblogs.asp.net/gsus... The Microsoft BRE was originally designed to be used as an embedded library in .NET applications. This is reflected in the implementation of the Rules Engine...
I installed the new BizTalk Server 2010 Developer Edition, released a couple of days ago, on a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual image. The installation went very smoothly, but I did notice one problem. Initially I attempted to upgrade the beta version of BizTalk Server. Brian Loesgen reports that this worked OK for him. However, I couldn't do this. The installer reported that upgrade from the Enterprise Edition to the Developer Edition is not supported. I attempted to uninstall the beta, but got an...
The BizTalk Server team announced today that BizTalk Server 2010 has RTMd. That's a relief, as my reputation was on the line regarding RTM before the end of the month. Just this Tuesday I confidently told a prospective customer to expect an imminent announcement. I've been playing with BTS 2010 for a little while now. It has been my constant companion while writing several chapters for the forthcoming BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed. It looks great. As well as bringing BTS up to date with Visual Studio...
Last week, I spent some time looking at a problem with a customer's orchestration. In one place, the developer had made use of the infamous BizTalk xpath() function to assign a value in one message to a decimal field in another message. He got an error stating that the application is "Unable to cast object of type 'System.Double' to type 'System.Xml.XmlNodeList'". This is due to a logical error in BizTalk's code. Read more at http://geekswithblogs.net/c...
This is the third and final part of a three-part series, as follows: · Part 1: Situating the Business Rules Engine · Part 2: Backward Chaining: the 'Simple Name' pattern · Part 3: Backward Chaining: the ‘Bound Variable' pattern In Part 2 we looked at how developers can use procedural attachments and 'directive events' to implement a simple form of backward chaining for Microsoft's Business Rule Engine. In this third, and final, part, we will extend the code to tackle more complex backward-chaining...
Full BizTalk Server 2004/2006 Archive