maandag 15 augustus 2011

Learn about the BizTalk Business rules Engine


One of the strong points of the BizTalk Server Integration suite is the inclusion of a very versatile, flexible and extendable Business rules engine.

This versatility, however, is the same thing that makes it widely underused in deployments using BizTalk Server. Even today, being on the market in various versions for more than 6 years, I see people often struggle with it.

The root problem: the same flexibility and versatility comes with a rather steep learning curve to master.

To help you get started, Microsoft has packed a hands-on learning guide into a Virtual Lab. You can get to it here.

Try it, you won't be disappointed.


donderdag 13 januari 2011

Schema referenced by Map has been deleted. The local, cached version of the BizTalk Server group configuration is out of date.

When deploying schema's and related maps to BizTalk Server 2010, you may receive the following error when undeploying the map:

Schema referenced by Map "*****" has been deleted. The local, cached version of the BizTalk Server group configuration is out of date. You must refresh the BizTalk Server group configuration before making further changes.

Me and a colleague discovered that this may be related to the Map project and the Schema project sharing the same .Net namespace.

When we deploy a solution that has 1 single namespace like company.application for all projects, we always encounter this error.

When we deploy solutions that have different namespaces per project, like company.application.schemas and company.application.maps, this will not occur.

This behaviour (bug?) is different from behaviour in BizTalk 2004 and 2006R2. I have not tested this in BizTalk 2009.

To remedy this problem, manualy undeploy the maps first, than the schemas.

If you have schemas and maps in a single project (not a best practice) you also have no problems.

dinsdag 4 januari 2011

BizTalk 2010 pipeline buildorder lost when using MsBuild.exe

When building solutions outside Visual Studio 2010 that contain both a pipeline project and a pipeline components project, building may fail.

As it seems, determining the buildorder for the components seems to be inclusive, leading for some solutions to fail with the message that references to the pipeline components cannot be resolved.

Cause for this is the fact that the reference is always to the GAC, not to a project. Somehow Visual Studio 'knows' this and acts accordingly, and when using MSBUILS this might fail. I say might, as we have solutions that do build consistently aswell as solutions that do fail consistently.

In order to 'fix' this, you have to manualy set your projects dependency.

In Visual Studio, right-click the solution and select Properties.

On the propertyscreen select Project Dependencies




There, select your Pipeline project and check the dependency with the Pipeline component.

Klik Apply, then save the solution.