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 not doing something similar in your deployments (either through your own work, or using Scott's) then you are really missing a trick. Also, a big ......
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 a map that maps to your envelope schema (for example in my case because the envelope schema is also the canonical batched data format), then that map ......
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 have to write the canonicalised document out to disk, then read it back in from disk and split it in the corresponding receive pipeline. This feels awfully ......