Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Today my BizTalk buddy Wouter Crooy had a problem with mass copy functiod he used inside his orchestration with a certain mapping. His mapping worked on development machine and development server, but failed to do so in test environment. Development and test were not exactly to same (it missed some patches for msxml and so on). He made an effort to get them equal, but still it did not work. So it became finding a needle in a haystack to find out what the exact problem was since he could not get it working. So what now? I suggested to use inline script instead of mass copy to achieve to same manner of mapping (he wanted to mass copy a any element). One can use the Mass Copy functoid () to recursively copy all data in an input instance message, to arbitrary depth, that corresponds to a specified node in the source schema to the position in an output instance message that is specified by the output link. One can also use inline xslt like in case you like to mimic mass copy for any elemen...

R ecently I was facing an integration challenge by creating a custom functiod to use in a mapping. How do I create a custom functiod? Well one can look at a sample on a machine, where a BizTalk instance is present (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\SDK\Samples\XmlTools\CustomFunctoid). Important is to import the BizTalk assembly: Microsoft.BizTalk.BaseFunctoids. This one can be found on the server containing the BizTalk instance in folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools. So you can start creating a custom functoid by creating an empty solution. In that solution one adds an empty project. Why this way, well if you want to create a custom functoid the same way as in the sample, starting off with a class library template in Visual Studio will give you a different set of things like properties. After adding the empty project, change properties of project to class library. Next create a strong name through properties, the assembly will la...