Ever wanted to quickly and easily try out different XPath expressions on your documents?

Just click this link!

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Today's tip is brought to you via the BizTalk 2006 Deep Dive training course that I'm on, run by Alan Smith of the Bloggers' Guide to BizTalk fame.. In BizTalk 2004, if you wanted to create an empty output element in your target document via the mapper, you had a couple of options. You could either use a string concat functoid with one empty input parameter, ......

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Flat file parsing in BTS2006 is pretty nice in general - you get a very specific error back in the error log if your incoming file is in the wrong format for the schema (or, put a more likely way, if you have buggered up creating the schema). However, this vague error stumped us for a little while: There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: ......

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Here's a braindump that I did for people with 2004 experience who are moving across to 2006. It's just a very quick run through some of the new bits and pieces to look out for. It's not complete, but it might be handy as the 50,000 ft view. It's also written with a dev audience in mind and is not necessarily the view of my employer either! (Is that ......

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Well, Owen has been bugging me to blog... so just to keep him quiet, here's something random...

If you want to hook up on the XBox 360 then here's my Gamercard!

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StrokeIt is a fantastic piece of software that I just found: It allows mouse gestures in all of your Windows applications. It's free for individual use, and a bargain $10 for use in corporate settings (details).If you've never tried Mouse Gestures, you are really missing out. Essentially you hold down the right mouse button, draw a shape on screen, ......

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I've noticed a number of referrals from Google from people looking for help with the UI Process block. Having spent some time with the UI Process Block I'd like to share my experiences, but to do that I would like to know what information people are after. Please leave me a comment below, or contact me directly using the "Contact" link above and I'll ......

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Owen Cutajar blogged about "The 5 biggest mistakes almost all web designers make". I'd like to add a site to the list... I recently tried to browse this page on the Sony Connect Website from a Windows 2003 PC, only to be informed that: We appreciate your interest in the Connect music store, but our store currently only works with computers running Windows ......

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The Solidsoft blogging community continues to grow! My colleague Richard Case has just started his blog. I know recently he's been doing some cool stuff with NAnt tasks for BizTalk deployment that have a lot of synergy with Scott Colestock's work and luckily don't overlap it too much, so check out his blog ......

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A couple of blog entries that I wanted to highlight, but I've been a bit late blogging on (blame short-sharp-"just do this project before Christmas would you?" type work). First, I'm sure you've all seen it by now, but Scott Colestock is continuing his barnstorming work on BizTalk deployment with NAnt. Check it out. BAT files are so 1980's ;-) If you're ......

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A few days ago, I blogged about splitting documents. It seems that there's a bug in BizTalk that means this approach won't work. The typical pattern when defining an envelope schema is to define your repeating node as one schema, and xs:import it to your envelope schema (for details, see Jan Tielen's excellent blog entry). Unfortunately, if you create ......

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An interesting scenario came up this afternoon. I receive a bunch of different documents containing address changes, which I map to my canonical "address changes" format in the receive port. I then want to split my canonical document using an envelope so that each address change record is out on its own. As far as I can see, to do this I'm going to ......

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I've held off posting on the WSDL-first approach so far because I've been waiting for the tools to arrive to make my gripes go away. Well, I'm still waiting... and waiting... In the BizTalk world, we already have a Service Oriented mindset. We communicate in terms of schema-defined documents; we offer up services not APIs. We want to be interoperable ......

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Things I like to see in my MSN window #1: "Can you get up to TVP? Halo 2 team are here and we're playing." WOOHOO! Just had a 6 minute deathmatch round against the UK XBox team. We lost about 50-20, which is pretty shabby, but I did manage to score a double kill. Dual wielding SMGs is teh roxx0rs! I just about resisted temptation to hit campaign mode ......

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I was chatting to my colleague Charles Young earlier today and it reminded me of an idea that I had a while back. Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of having expression shapes (and the awful expression editor window ;-) ), we instead had an ASP.NET-like "code behind" model allowing us to use any .NET language, and not have to worry about working within ......

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