Just a little note here that we noticed testing something (how it had not occurred before, I do not know).  We have a function that we were referencing from a referenced assembly that would format values to the slightly odd format being used by the ERP that we were talking too.  In  most cases it seamed to work OK, but for smaller values it didn't quite product the result we expected. It turns out that the result of the Division functiod in BizTalk Server 2006 is a double.  The mapper being the way it is converts this to a string (assumably using .ToString()).  At least this is how it looks w... [More]

If you're using BizTalk Server maps, it is about 99.999% likely that you are using logic in them.  Testing this functionality in Visual Studio can be tedious as the only way to change the test document is in the properties of the map.  So if you have quite a few scenarios to test, this method sucks.  BizTalk Server 2000 and 2002 allowed you to select the test document at runtime, which was nice I suppose but it still meant that you had to do it manually all the time. With the exception of either figuring out how to use BizUnit and actually deploying your solution, there are not too many ways ... [More]

I ran in to this problem recently while developing a solution for a client.  For me it took a little while to figure out what was happening and the error was reported to be coming from a send shape that sent a message of type System.Xml.XmlDocument. While this is the correct place for the error to be raised, it was not strictly related to them message that I was trying to send. The actual cause of the problem is that I have a class that is used to return information back from a series of helper methods in a library that I have built.  The class has 3 public properties: Result: An inum... [More]

Overview The above message can be quite frustrating if you don't know why you are getting it.  Microsoft's take on this particular error message when you try to compile you BizTalk Server project is pretty much detailed in the article: You may receive a "Message has not been initialized in construct statement" error message when you build a BizTalk Server 2004 solution in Visual Studio One of the times I have come across this problem is when I want to create a message in an orchestration that is not the result of a transform.  At first I was confused by this error, but it does sort... [More]

Well now this is an odd little problem.  I was working on a BizTalk Server project recently and needed to promote some properties to the messaging engine.  The normal scenario is to do the following: Right-click in the schema and select 'Promote > Show Promotions...' Click the 'Property Fields' tab Click the little folder to open our property schema that we have already built. Select the property schema in the dialogue and click OK. Assign our fields Now, I ran in to a problem here and I have yet to find the cause or a fix.  Basically, I don't get the dial... [More]

This is kind of a not to anyone who does not understand why their send port filters might be being ignored.  It is not the be-all and end-all of the problem as there may be various reasons for the problem occurring. If you are attempting to use filtering on Send Ports that belong to a Send Port Group, then forget it.  BizTalk Server assumes that if the Send Port Group receives the message, then all Send Ports in that group must want the message regardless of any filters that you may have set up.  It basically ignores the filtering in the port completely.  This would not be so much of a pr... [More]

Overview For a while now, I have been working on a project that uses a helper class to send any error emails out that may occur during document processing.  In order for the helper class to know the recipient and sender for the emails, I have been relying on a custom configuration file which is retrieved from the registry.  Now, I inherited this project, and whilst the configuration file was originally used for a great deal of settings, it is now only used for these email addresses. Now - I'm actually running two versions of the same BizTalk Server solution in different applications on the s... [More]

I have always found that documenting BizTalk Server projects can be somewhat difficult and time consuming.  At that back of my mind, I’ve always wanted a tool that I could simply point at the installation and it would clear documentation for me. While looking through Darren Jefford’s blog I happened across this article about 64 Bit BizTalk Documenter support.  Naturally, I opened the article, and installed the thing immediately.  It’s a great, basic little app that will create a help file for your BizTalk Server configuration.  It obviously does not elaborate on what a map does; it does give ... [More]

Recently, I was trying to go back and complete my blog about using web services in BizTalk without using orchestrations.  As is quite normal for me, my notes were generally bereft of any real detail and I could not for the life of me figure out how I managed to get Visual Studio to generate an XSD (and thus a schema to use in BizTalk).  It was simply written and 'Visual Studio will create the schema for me'; all very good and well but it was not creating one for me now. In my attempts to try recreating the scenario whereby I could create the XSD from a web reference, I created a simple web ... [More]

I have recently been working on a project where I have the following scenario: Receive a flat file from system X. Map the flat file to an internal message schema. Send the mapped message to a web service in system Y. Three very basic steps, I am sure you will agree.  I did however run in to a problem with date formatting.  I had agreed with the developers of system Y, that thye shold be using System.DateTime for  their dates and not worrying about the format required by system X.  When serializing, this was fine and we got the dates that BizTalk was happy with. I.e. 2007... [More]

No, I know that if you read the Microsoft curriculum, it will tell you how wonderful things like Debug.Assert() are; to a great extent, they are. The problem with using them in an assembly that is called by BizTalk is that BizTalk runs in an Isolated Host. What this means is, if you try to do any sort of debuggin in BizTalk with a deployed assembly, you will never see the pretty litle pop-up box.  The worker thread will simply hang in an active state until you kill all of the services and start all over. They key thing to remeber is that the .Assert method in general pop up a little e... [More]

I recently had an issue in BizTalk where I needed to start off an orchestration with one of two types of message.  This in itself is not a difficult task, although I do find that the documentation is a little lacking some times and it can take a while to figure out how it is done.  In fact, some rather sketchy documentation will tell you that you may only have one activating receive shape at the start of an Orchestration without mentioning the exceptions to that rule; namely the Listen shape and the Parallel Actions shape. In this post, we are concerned with the Listen shape.  But we need t... [More]

I use BizTalk on my local machine, I'm sure a lot of other people do too as it save a some time in logging on and off servers and starting up Virtual PCs etc.  The problem with desktops is that, on rare occasions, ITS hope along and renames them.  This can cause quite an issue if you happen to be using Enterprise Single Sign-On (ENTSSO) on your local machine too. What I noticed was, after a rename, I couldn't do anything with ENTSSO in terms of use it,, start it as a service or administer it.  This is because the management tools seem do be dependent on the service itself, and the service is ... [More]

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 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]

OK, so it looks like someone has put together a tool for unit testing BizTalk Server. Wow, I wish I'd know that this existed on some of my previous projects.  I'm going to have to go and play with this now and see just how good it is.  I normally end up writing a whole heap of extra BizTalk stuff (i.e. pretend SAP systems etc) to test my solutions, I hope this will make things quicker and easier for us all. You can get more information on Kevin B Smith's blog.  Worth a read I feel

One of our guys came up across this error recently on a system we have been developing for one of our clients.  It's not en error that I have seen before so I thought it worth mentioning.  The full error was: The InboundTransportLocation is disallowed. This could be because the receive location is disabled or its service window is currently inactive. It took us a bit to figure out (i think about 10 minutes combined), and it turns out that the document that we were receiving was invalid and we were using an XMLReceive pipeline with the AllowUnrecognisedMessage property of the pipeline ... [More]

In BizTalk 2000 and 2002, document tracking can be a right royal pain in the bottom if you (or a predecessor) leave it on by mistake. In one particular example, Document Tracking was left on and database InterchangeDTA mdf file filled the disk up (22gb) when client put through large # of XMLs. As the data was not required we detached database, deleted db and recreated db using a generated script from an identical version/type of BizTalk (details below). 300k suspended messages were also removed. Quick, Cheap and Dirty Resolution: First of all confirm with client you need document trac... [More]

This article is really just to give more clarity on my previous article about consuming web services in BizTalk using messaging without Orchestrations. I wanted to be able to take those who are fairly new to BizTalk Server through the whole process. What I did not mention in my pervious article is that this solution was reached after a fair bit of investigation between Marvin Smit and I while I was attending one of the Develop Mentor training sessions that he was running. While the end result seems pretty straight forward, it took us a while to get there. There are no doubt improvements that c... [More]

This is a brief introduction and gloss-over article about calling webservices directly in BizTalk messaging without using an orchestration. It's something the I wanted to try out as a result of a training course when I though 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could do that?' Read my article on it here.