Walter Michel

I recently encountered a troubling problem while creating a BizTalk 2006 R2 solution. Everything was working fine until I tried to open the Orchestration Designer to edit one of the orchestrations I had been working of for a couple of days. Visual Studio crashed immediately. I tried a few things, but I could not open any orchestration without Visual Studio crashing (no errors in event log, no dialog, nothing...). I finally fixed it by backing up and deleting my Visual Studio profile. The profile information is stored in a folder. This folder is located in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0. I don't know what got messed up in the profile. Clearly some sort of VS/BizTalk bug.

When using orchestration breakpoints, make sure you clear them all when you want to build and redeploy the solution.  Any existing orchestration breakpoints will make it impossible to unload the associated assemblies from the GAC.  As long as there are any breakpoints in an orchestration the updated assemblies will not be used.

This is really a bug and should be addressed.

 

 

When creating a web service using the WCF-BasicHttp adapter, make sure that you adjust the “Maximum received message size” binding configuration to jive with the size of the message you expect to hit the service.  If a request is made to the web service that contains a payload that is larger than this setting, an HTTP 400 (Bad Message) error will be generated.  The default maximum size is 64K, which seems a bit small.

 

 

Tomas Restrepo has created a couple of excellent articles about the future of BizTalk, WCF and WF. 

http://www.winterdom.com/weblog/2007/08/25/WCFAndBizTalkMessaging.aspx

http://www.winterdom.com/weblog/CommentView,guid,54C51C66-96B9-435F-82CC-409CF88EFC6B.aspx

 

Let's try to keep it around: