Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

Today I passed the 70-235 exam, required for earning the MCTS BizTalk Server 2006 certification. About 20% of the questions was related to the Business Rule Engine (BRE) and another 15% to Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). The other questions were all general BizTalk questions, including some questions on Role Links. I found the exam a little difficult, mainly because I haven’t worked with the BRE that much and also haven’t used Role Links. Luckily I took the BizTalk 2006 Deep Dive course by QuickLearn, which gave me the basic knowledge on these subjects.

Jolly, they got me! Dennis just tagged me. At first I had no clue what it meant, but it seems a game of tag, and now I’m it. This means I have to write five things not much people know about me. So here it goes

1. My girlfriend is Tamara Bos and we’re together for over 7.5 years now. She’s my first and only true love and we are very happy with each other, especially now we are living together in Almere since last october.
2. I wanted to be a comic writer. You could always find me draw, wherever I was. I got a book on how to draw comics and tried every technique in it. Since I got a real computer I don’t practice drawing anymore. These days I express myself when I design websites on the computer instead.
3. I was very active in the mod tracking scene under various nick names, including DJ Schnibble and Snith. It started out as a joke when I wanted to cover the horrific song ‘Ik zing dit lied voor jou alleen’ by Jantje Smit. After that I covered ‘7PM’ by ATB and finally created about twenty tracks of various styles.
4. I’ve made two short movies in a school contest and won the awards for best movie and best male and best music. The first movie was about a hippie who killed people because he needed meatloaf for in his soup. I created the complete sound effects track in mod tracker. Because I only had a video recorder I needed to dub the whole track to the tape at once. The second movie was called Split Second and it was about a detective who’s girlfriend got kidnapped. This was the first movie at the school contest to be edited completely on the computer. We added a lot of special effects like explosions, gun fire and sound effects.
5. I played soccer for almost my whole life. At the age of five I wanted to play soccer, but was too young. Because they had one kid short I was added to the team at Unicum. My position on the field was left-back, but sometimes I played left-center. This means I didn’t score too often, but I didn’t care. For years I played in the highest team, but before I reached the age I could play for the first team I quit soccer. Mainly because I disliked the morale of a couple of players, but also because I needed time for my education. After my time on the field I played indoor soccer for a couple of years with some friends. When most of them quit I wanted to return to field soccer, but during the second training I made a wrong move and tore the meniscus of my right knee. I don’t play since then and won’t play it anymore. I’ve moved to other sports instead, like tennis and spinning.

Phiew, that’s it. Now I pass it along to Mark, Ronald, Olav, Tamara and Jeroen
Good luck, you’ve just been tagged!

I would like to share one interesting tool I came across. This is a tool for Viewing BizTalk Assemblies Deployed on BizTalk Server. Not only you can view the deployed assemblies but can also view the contents of the assembly by double clicking on assembly. Also you can dive deeper by double clicking the individual BizTalk Artifact where you can view more detailed info. Say if, you double click a schema of an assembly you will see the schema of that particular message.

To install this utility on your BizTalk server, go to Start -> Run and enter the command below:
Regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\Developer Tools\BtsAsmExt.dll”

You will get a popup saying the component has been registered. Now open an explorer window and you will be able to see a new folder called BizTalk Server Assemblies under the My Computer node. Double click it and you will see a list of currently deployed assemblies. Double click one assembly and you’ll find all the BizTalk artifacts in that assembly. Double click one artifact and you will see its details.

For beginners BizTalk can be really difficult to learn. They don’t know how to perform certain tasks and are stunned by a lot of (for them) cryptical warnings and errors. Luckily there’s the BizTalk Troubleshooting Guide which covers most (if not all) of the tasks, messages, tips, trics, know-hows and what else. Even for an experienced BizTalk enthousiast like me it contains a lot of interesting stuff. Use it as your BizTalk bible.

Sometimes the requirement for your BizTalk solution is to receive a flat file (read: not xml) in your orchestration an do something with the data. An example could be receiving a PDF file and extracting some portions of data out of it. Some BizTalk developers already know that you can receive whatever file without treating it as XML by using System.Xml.XmlDocument as its message type (sounds silly doesn’t it?). After you’ve received the message you can’t access it as you normally do because it’s still a byte stream. Charles Young dives into this subject and explains how you can access the data that is contained in such messages. Thanks Charles!

Maybe the simplest way to store configuration data for your BizTalk solution is to use the BTSNTSvc.exe.config file and the System.Configuration namespace to access that data. Most of the time I’m using this method on projects, but it introduces problems in BizTalk farms because you need to keep the configuration in sync. Another way would be to use a database, but that still requires a connection string to be present somewhere (again the BTSNTSvc.exe.config file?)

Jon Flanders provided a great new way to store configuration data: the SSO database. The first time I heard about it I thought it was very complex but after reading his post on the matter it seems rather simple. Using this method you get automatic distributed configuration plus automatic encryption! He provides a sample project with a configuration tool to edit the configuration and an orchestration to try it out. This is definitely the way I’m going to store configuration data for any future BizTalk projects.

Mike McKeown has a great blog where he elaborates on BizTalk Adapter development. He has some nice tutorials, howto’s and whitepapers listed on his blog. Some time ago he released a BizTalk Adapter developent whitepaper regarding transactional adapters and adapter base classes. You should definetely read this if you’re involved in developing new adapters. Also don’t forget to read his other material.

Tomas Restrepo wrote a really useful framework to test pipelines and pipeline components. Some time ago he released the first version of his framework and posted a couple of howto’s to get you started. It’s definitely worth stopping by his blog.

Check out this great post by Richard Seroter on using the BAM API to collect BAM data inside a loop, creating a hierarchy of activities. Not doing too much with the BAM API I found it a great way to understand it’s usage and flexibility.