Chris and Mike confirm the details of the upcoming SOA and Business Process conference in October 2007. I was fortunate enough to attend last year’s event, and would highly encourage folks to attend this year. It’s a great place to meet up in person with BizTalk community folks and receive a fair mix of high… [Read more…]
July 30, 2007
What happens to downstream SOAP recipients if the message sent from BizTalk is a different “version” than the original? Let’s assume I have an enterprise schema that represents my company’s employees (e.g. “Workforce”). BizTalk receives this object from SAP and fans it out to a variety of downstream systems (via SOAP). Because direct messaging with… [Read more…]
July 27, 2007
I recently completed another round of interviews for my company in the search for BizTalk consultants. Yet again, it was a fairly depressing experience. I offer a few humble tips to folks claiming to be BizTalk architects/developers. My first pet peeve is gigantic resumes. I know that headhunters often beef these things up, but if… [Read more…]
July 24, 2007
I’m currently teaching a “BizTalk Developer” class for my colleagues and as usual, I learned something I didn’t know before. Maybe it’s common knowledge, but it was new to me. Specifically, I never had figured out how to turn nodes in my schema into actual “complex types” to be used elsewhere. Let’s say I start… [Read more…]
July 20, 2007
Well, count me among the folks who thought that the BizTalk HotRod magazine would be a “one hit wonder.” I’m very happily proven wrong as there was a great new issue released this week. Some highlights include: Deep look at various complicated BizTalk mapping scenarios and solutions “Smack down” between a BizTalk and comparable WF/WCF… [Read more…]
July 19, 2007
If you’re still facing issues deciding which sort of workflow/rules technology from Microsoft to use (e.g. Windows Workflow vs. BizTalk), check out the latest well-written piece by Charles Young. He covers many of the specific differences to consider when deciding which Microsoft technology will work best for your given application. Technorati Tags: BizTalk, Workflow, Business… [Read more…]
July 19, 2007
A misunderstanding about how BizTalk builds MSI packages for applications caused me some recent heartache. Let’s say I have a BizTalk “application” with the following resources: As you can see, I’ve got a BizTalk assembly, a “standard” .NET assembly, binding file, text file, and virtual directory (for a web service). In my simple mind, I… [Read more…]
July 13, 2007
We were recently architecting a solution that involved BizTalk calling a synchronous web service from an orchestration in a high volume scenario. What happens if the web service takes a long time to complete? Do you run the risk of timeouts in orchestrations that hadn’t even had a chance to call the service yet? Let’s… [Read more…]
July 11, 2007
A couple of useful BizTalk whitepapers released today. It’s good to see two once-dormant BizTalk blogs (first MartyWaz, now Doug from the CSD Customer Experience) wake up in the past couple weeks. The first paper, Best Practices for the SQL Adapter, covers how to properly write SQL receive location queries, deal with unsupported data types,… [Read more…]
July 9, 2007
Have you ever wanted a clean query of traffic through BizTalk on a per application basis? And, how about exposing that information to your internal users in a very Web 2.0 fashion? Our chief architect asked me if it was feasible to syndicate BizTalk metrics using a product like RSSBus. Given that BizTalk’s messaging metrics… [Read more…]
July 30, 2007
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