A recent problem we’ve come in to in deploying BizTalk solutions was that there seemed to be some kind of hard-coded path in the MSI that was created using the BizTalk Administrator.  Almost as an after thought, running the MSI would eventually present the following error: An error occurred while attempting to install the BizTalk application: Change requests failed for some resources. BizTalkAssemblyResourceManager failed to complete end type change request. Unable to add\update the assembly with LUID=”[My Assembly Name], Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8def88... [More]

When i decided to take the long and winding road to MCTS glory i read a couple of reviews on the Textbooks available to help me. As they're weren't many books at the time i went for: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation - Self-Paced Training Kit. In the main its a good book, with both C# and VB code examples, however the reviews on amazon said there were a few errors in it... and well i've found the first! Page 78 says: How to change a file extension: string ourPath = @"c:\boot.ini"; Console.WriteLine("Ext : {0}", Path.GetExtension(ourPath)); Console.W... [More]

Just got back from the Business & Decision 2007 Seminar in Napitia, southern Italy. Was a good event with plenty of networking and fun, but thanks to the Industrial action by Alitalia we got back 36 hours late :) ...and tomorrow I'm off to South Africa due to some unfortunate and unforseen circumstances. I should buy shares in Shell, the amount of fuel I'm burning atm!

Entries for the BCS Oxfordshire Schools web competition are now closed! Judging is taking place ready for the prize giving on 20th June at the Shrivenham campus of Cranfield. The competition was sponsored, amongst others, by Business & Decision and Microsoft (thanks Mark for you help!).

There is so much useful stuff to learn about through the MCTS path. Don't you just hate having to write a common functionality class that e-mails you with errors? Well, you've wasted your time, as ASP .NET 2.0 does this for you without you writing a single line of code. Here is what you do: 1) Add a health monitoring section <configuration>    <system.web>       <healthMonitoring enabled="true" heartbeatInterval ="0">       </healthMonitoring>   </system.web> </configuration> 2) Add a providers section inside the health monitoring to ale... [More]

When you install BizTalk 2006 (and BizTalk 2004 also I assume) the default editor for XSD files is set to be the BizTalk Editor.  This is great if all you are doing is creating BizTalk schemas.  If you do however want to do something different, for example create a DataSet you will run in to problems. When I tried to createa a DataSet I got a nice little error telling me it had failed, then I tried to open the resulting file (which is also and XSD) to soo the BizTalk Editor try to open it.  Not too clever really. In order to get around this, make sure you set your default editor back to XML ... [More]

One of my pet hates is SQL Server cursors. Yes, I know that they are part of the product for a reason, and I know that they are very handy. So why do I hate them, and what can be done to avoid them? Are they a necessary evil? I developed a technique to avoid them a few years ago, and some others people have since designed some techniques as well, such as on this post. These other techniques are great, but my style of doing things has the one advantage that it can be repeated and nested in complex ways because of the use of variable tables... as you'll see below. Well, lets first create some t... [More]

Recently, a client wanted to set up their network in 3 workgroups. The workgroups consisted of: - SQL Server 2005 - Website (ASP .NET 2.0) - BizTalk 2006 Upon installing BizTalk, I found that I could not access the SQL Server machine across the workgroups, although the website could quite happily access the SQL (through the connection string). It turns out that BizTalk 2006 installs a component called Enterprise Single-Sign On (ESSO) which requires SQL to either be installed on the same machine or to be part of a domain. To fix the problem, I created a domain and now BizTalk is a... [More]

When installing BizTalk 2006 on one machine, with its SQL counterpart on another machine in the same domain I had an error "Exception of type 'System.EnterpriseServices.TransactionProxyException' was thrown.". This error means that DTC (Distributed Transaction Co-ordinator) is not installed/running on the SQL Server machine. Either start the service or install it via the "Add/Remove Windows Components" tab under the Application Server entry.

We've been using TableAdapters created using the XSD designer in VS2005 lately, and have found they have a couple of gotchas. For example, one limitation of a TableAdapter is the lack of support for SQL stored proc return values when using a non-scalar stored proc call - or at least, lack of any useful access to them. You'd expect that maybe the return value would be the return from the auto-genned function, but you'd be wrong. The return is actually the number of rows affected, and that in itself is useless if you're turning row count off in the stored proc (as many do). So maybe the Return... [More]

Microsoft have released Fiddler Version 2(.0.8.8) of their application. One issue I found is that I installed version 2 over version 1.x, and since it installed it in a different directory from version 1.x, it removed a shared ActiveX control upon uninstallation. If, when loading Fiddler on Version 2, you see the following error appear: Remove version 2.x, and then re-install it. You should have no problems. Thanks to Eric Lawrence for his quick reply on the subject.