February 2005 - Posts

Finding Orchestration ID

Recently I had to do some reporting for which I was not able to use BAM . So i had to write some custom code to track data from promoted properties by populating a seperate DB . One of the interesting problem was to also report the stat of the orchestration. This is possible in BizTalk as each orchestration has a unique Instance ID you can take that out in an expression shape OrchInstGuid = System.Convert.ToString(Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.Service.RootService.InstanceId) We can then check for status of the orchestrations using this instance ID

The QuickStart Guide to Installing and Configuring BizTalk Server 2004 for Windows Server 2003

There was lot of times when I wanted a good documentation for installign Biztalk and I feel the Installation guide but every other minute you eil be downloading some service pack or the other . this is one concrete place where everything is listedThe QuickStart Guide to Installing & Configuring BizTalk Server 2004 for Windows Server 2003

BizTalk Feed

I like this feed linkBizTalk FeedThis has some great tips and great links

Biztalk 2004 pipeline components

If you are thinking of writing a Custom BTS 2004 pipeline component . This would be my number on recommended article written by Christof It goes ito how to promote properties from inside your pipeline ;It discusses why your component needs to be streamed and some of those nifty things; that you tend to forget and even if you have written one before I still think this is a good read.

Biztalk 2004 Partner Competency Exam Training Guide

Biztalk 2004 Partner Competency Exam Training Guide was released . Grab it here So my next plan should be to see if can put myself through the certification engine. I have never done this certifiaction thing . IT certification value is largely at Debate mostly due to issue with dumps. How do you feel about certifications . I would like to hear your opinion using the Email link on the page

Mini Visual Studio

Ever waited like a minute or so for Visual studio to load up and all you wanted to do was to test out some small console code to prove a concept, I am sure most of us have . and If you have you are gonna love this Snippet compiler That reminds me while I was working in Redmond I have seen a stripped down verson of the IDE called RASCAL . I am not able to find any link to that now

HAT and Biztalk Debugging

Biztalk Server 2004 follows a Hub-Bus hybrid model and why it is a better model is because it takes the best of each of these individual styles namely Scaling out , throughput and golden copy of data( Centralized data store ) . Every message gets tored in the messagebox . This is how Biztalk achieves Statelessness. This is one of the reason why the Debugging tool ( HAT) is like the way it is . Although I have heard lot of people complaining about HAT and comparing them to Visual studio debugging support which are excellent many dont realise the nature of Biztalk . Unlike traditional debugging enterprise Stateless application like Biztalk being stateless in nature writes out events to a Database . and a tool like Kat is just a reporting screen of those events . ( You can do live debuggging -but only if you explicitly set it to) Another way to get to see errors in Biztalk is to run Debugview from www.sysinternals.com . Now you can write out your Debug messages using System.Debug Namespace

New Biztalk Blog

I have decided to move my post onto  bloggingabout.NET have been planning to do that for sometime but was in an aggressive schedule last month . So now that I got this all setup , I should be posting more often , Primarily why this move is I decided to post amore stuff on BTS 2006 and also move my old blog here