Benny Mathew

Last Saturday we had a one day event called Middleware Mania 2007 at BDotNet (http://groups.msn.com/BDOTNET), India’s largest and most active .NET user group in Bangalore with 8750+ members. Held in one of Microsoft’s building, which received a good number of people right from junior developers, solutions architects to project managers.

I got invited to present 2 sessions at the event, one was on the New Features in BizTalk Server 2006 and the other was on Adapter Development in BizTalk 2006.

You can download the presentations and code form the link below.

http://www.seamless.in/files/NewFeaturesInBizTalk2006.zip

http://www.seamless.in/files/AdapterDevelopmentinBizTalk2006.zip

 For me, this was a good event after a long time… there were other presenters who gave good presentations on RosettaNet Implementation Framework (RNIF), Introduction to BizTalk,  Enterprise Integration Patterns etc. Received a lot of good feed back about the presentations.

Over all it was fun…, the audience was quite enthusiastic, they even did a little leg-pulling of one of the presenter and one funny lady who was there to promote her company and was woo-ing  everyone to join her company 🙂

I finally bought myself an O2 Atom Exec (mobile phone), that I’ve been waiting long to lay my hands on.

Guess I will be busy, the next couple of days checking out all the features and gazing at it :).

Check out the review here:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/08/12/o2-xda-atom-exec-reviews/

Here is an interesting post on Richard Seroter’s blog on persistence points.
If you plan to have a business process integration that could be interrupted and resumed due to external factors, then knowing about persistance points is very useful and important for the correct functioning of your BizTalk application.

Check it out here…

http://seroter.wordpress.com/2007/01/02/orchestration-handling-of-suspended-messages/

Lee, from the BizTalk product team at Microsoft, literally warns you against fiddling with the BizTalk MessageBox. 🙂

Pun apart, he gives you some DOs and DON’Ts about the MessageBox and SQL Server.

Check it out here…

http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/archive/2007/01/04/what-you-can-and-can-t-do-with-the-messagebox-database-server.aspx

Here is a very handy list of promoted context properties and their name spaces that I found on Stephen Kaufman’s WebLog.

Receive Side

1.  ReceivedFileName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/file-properties)

2.  InboundTransportLocation (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

3.  InterchangeID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

4.  ReceivePortID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

5.  ReceivePortName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

6.  WasSolicitResponse (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

7.  AuthenticationRequiredOnReceivePort (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

8.  InboundTransportType (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

9.  LRPMsgBodyTracking (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

10. MessageExchangePattern (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

11. PortName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/messagetracking-properties)

12. ReceivePipelineID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

13. MessageType (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

14. SchemaStrongName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

 
Send Side

1.  CopyMode (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/file-properties)

2.  LTPMsgBodyTracking (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

3.  ReceivedFileName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/file-properties)

4.  SPID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

5.  ActualRetryCount (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

6.  FileName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/file-properties)

7.  PartyName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/messagetracking-properties)

8.  ReceivePortName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

9.  WasSolicitResponse (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

10. AllowCacheOnWrite (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/file-properties)

11. RetryInterval (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

12. OutboundTransportCLSID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

13. SPName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

14. InboundTransportLocation (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

15. InterchangeID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

16. ReceivePortID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

17. SPTransportID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

18. TransmitPipelineID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

19. AuthenticationRequiredOnReceivePort (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

20. InboundTransportType (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

21. LRPMsgBodyTracking (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

22. MessageExchangePattern (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

23. OutboundTransportLocation (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

24. PortName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/messagetracking-properties)

25. ReceivePipelineID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

26. SourcePartyID (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

27. MessageType (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

28. OutboundTransportType (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

29. PartNames (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/messageagent-properties)

30. RetryCount (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

31. SchemaStrongName (http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/system-properties)

Charles Young has written an excellent article on Compensation in BizTalk. Check it out here.

http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2006/12/06/100426.aspx

Here are a few links that might help you to answer some of the BizTalk questions that you may face in a job interview.

All the best 😉

http://geekswithblogs.net/sthomas/archive/2005/12/13/63077.aspx
http://geekswithblogs.net/sthomas/archive/2005/12/29/64404.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/BizTalkInterviewQuestions.asp
http://www.netologi.se/default.aspx?Contents=BizTalkFAQ

Here is a list of macros for the FILE send handler that I found on Jan Tielens’ Bloggings.
This is something I find everyone googling for quite often, so thought of putting it up here for quick reference.

For the details of each of the macros, please see Jan Tielens’ Bloggings
%datetime%
%datetime_bts2000%
%datetime.tz%
%DestinationParty%
%DestinationPartyID%
%DestinationPartyQualifier%
%MessageID%
%SourceFileName%
%SourceParty%
%SourcePartyID%
%SourcePartyQualifier%
%time%
%time.tz%

I am back to regular bloging… Year 2006 has been very different and unique, I experienced a lot of things that has made me more mature, faced a lot of ups and downs, learnt new things, even learnt a little people management 🙂

All this also gave me the strength and courage to quit Two Connect and startup my own company Seamless Integration Solutions (http://www.seamless.in/).

Hope 2007 will be a good year.

Wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year.!!!!