Patrick Wellink

Something you REALLY should know about dates ! (beeing Kind to DateTime.Kind)

2011-09-02T14:07:00Z

Here we go, some important stuff about dates.....(it's not only BizTalk related) I had a very simple scenario. Webservice Receives a request (with several datetime fields in it) Send the received message to SQL via the WCF adapter For some obscure reason some datetime values originating from the same WebRequest got modified once in the database and some did not. After some tracing we found that the dates were serialized in a different way once inside the webservice. some of the formats we saw...(read more)

I think this is a bug in the orchestration engine but I am not really sure.

2011-05-04T14:59:00Z

Today I had a very weird problem. I submitted a message via a WCF webservice and had an orchestration listening on the messagebox for that particular messagetype. The orchestration does some serious data-massage and needs to store the converted message a couple of times. For this I created some helper components that store the changed message in a database (all the logic is in a callable orchestration). Below is a sample of the orchestration that went wrong. So it's nothing too fancy and I have...(read more)

Ntrace is available for Visual studio 2010

2011-05-03T07:16:00Z

Ntrace is a great tool for logging. It has virtually no impact and is blazing fast. Finally it's been migrated to Visual studio 2010. So now I can start building my BizTalk Bestpractice toolbox with it. The author of Ntrace can probably explain best what it is... What is this ETW thing? Event Tracing for Windows is a kernel-level tracing service that has been around since Windows 2000. Since it’s baked right into the kernel, it is extremely fast. Most of the developers that use ETW are...(read more)

Really nice BizTalk Admin tool, BizTalk 360

2011-05-03T07:10:00Z

Today I stumbled upon a really nice BizTalk admin tool. (thanks google reader) Have a look at it >>here<< It's a kind of Silverlight BizTalk Administration console with quite a few extra's. Really good work !...(read more)

Removing unwanted namespaces from a BizTalk Map

2011-03-10T07:53:00Z

BizTalk is a great tool but sometimes the output is a little unreadable because of the number of namespaces in a document. This post is related to a previous post where I had to import a zillion schemas . Once I had those schema's imported I could map them but the ouput looked as the picture below. So about 120 namespace declarations and then some data. (the namespace declaration was about 10K and the message itself only 5K) This was not what the customer desired and they wanted to get rid of...(read more)

XSLT Distinct another way to determine distinct in XSLT 1.0

2011-02-17T09:26:00Z

I had a requirement to map a buyer only if it was the same buyer throughout the entire document. The reason for this was that in the source document the buyer was defined in a sub sub sub node of a document and in the destination it occurred only once. So I ended up with several choices. Only map the first buyer Don't map Only map if they were the same throughout the entire document For sure the first option would be a bad thing. The second option would work for all parties involved (it's...(read more)

xs:int and xs:integer, what's the difference....

2011-02-08T08:05:00Z

I am busy creating schema's and exposing them as a web service. I always generate a client and try to post some messages and this time I was again surprised by BizTalk. (or should I say XML). When creating a schema you can chose several types for an element. Some of these are xs:int and xs:integer . I noticed these two before but didn't bother too much. But now for the first time I see there is a clear difference in the way stuff is treated by .Net. Below is a screenshot of a node with the...(read more)

Millions of records in the BAMAlertsApplication and how to get rid of them (NSVacuum to the rescue)

2011-02-03T07:22:00Z

As a BizTalk consultant I always implement BAM to do basic auditing. This is besides the BAM a business analist would want to see. The basic functionality of this audit trial is: When was the message received Where did it came from Where did it go What happend to the message Any important business decision made in an orchestration I write this audit data into a BAM view, and it has proven to be valuable information. From time to time you will get questions regarding messages and it's always nice...(read more)

Getting rid of : WCF-Custom" raised an error message. Details "System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired

2010-12-22T07:27:00Z

I had a nice setup in my BizTalk environment. I had 4 receive locations polling for data (in the same table) and it all boiled down to execute a stored procedure with different parameters. I used the WCF adapter with SQL bindings for that. For some obscure reason, I would get timeouts in the eventlog. Below is a screenshot of the receive port setup I had. Only one is shown but I had four of them. Some important things to notice: PolledDataAvailablestatement, is not used cause Pollwhiledatatfound...(read more)

Download all files referenced in an xsd locally (+ Possible fix for BizTalk CS0013 compilation error)

2010-09-30T09:23:00Z

Well if you ever end up like me with a XSD that has about a zillion includes ( schemaLocation ), maybe this tool is something for you. It is a pretty simple tool. You give it an XSD, and it will download all files that are referenced to your local system. It will parse the file names a bit and set them all to the local download folder. This way you can simply include the folders and downloaded schema's in your BizTalk Project. For example take the schema's from UNECE like http://www.unece...(read more)

My BizTalk infrastructure design baseline

2010-09-28T12:53:00Z

Today I found a great post about a nice BizTalk infrastructure baseline. It's always hard to specify what you need and why you need it. In an excellent blogposting Johan Hedberg explains what he needs and (more important why). Follow >> this link << to have a read of his excellent post by Johan....(read more)

Strange COM exception in BizTalk

2010-09-27T10:11:00Z

A while ago I had serious problems with BizTalk. For some obscure reason the BizTalk engine would throw some XLANG errors and stop processing all messages. A restart of the hosts would fix the problem for a while but after some time the same problem would occur and BizTalk would effectively stop processing. (orchestrations would be marked as active but nothing happens) The funny thing is, these orchestrations were deployed on the BizTalk Server a long time ago and they never gave any problem. All...(read more)

Using XSLT Templates in a map (reminder@self)

2010-08-16T08:24:00Z

We all know that using XSLT inside a map can be very usefull to do stuff that's very hard to do with the mapper itself. Sometimes using XSLT it is the only way things can be done. I find myself struggeling each time to figure out how specific tasks work with XSLT. That's why I write this post. So I wont have to figure it all out again the next time i need this functionality.... Below is some code used in an 'Inline XSLT Call Template' to calculate the number of segments in a message...(read more)

Again a BizTalk Hotrod issue you should not miss

2010-07-29T07:57:00Z

Last week I stumbled upon the Tenth issue op BizTalk HotRod. I have looked into it a couple of times cause there are so much goodies in there. The items covered in this issue are: Creating Business Documents Automating deployments of BizTalk change requests Request and Response Message Pattern Instrumentation Best Practices for High Performance BizTalk Solutions Financial Messaging Service Bus How To Boost Message Transformations Using the XslCompiledTransform class Go and get this issue, you can...(read more)

Interessante Blog Postings

2010-06-30T06:47:00Z

Gedurende een bepaalde periode kom je op het internet interessante zaken tegen of zijn er interesante blogpostings gedaan. Soms google je wat en kom je een oude maar zeer interessante blogposting tegen. In dit artikel wil ik een aantal van deze blogpostings/blogposters/artikelen aanstippen. Maxime Labelle Heeft een interessant blog waar hij af en toe diep ingaat op de werking van BizTalk. Er zitten veel code voorbeelden bij. Enkele noemenswaardige zaken zijn onder andere: A Base Class for Building...(read more)