Error: “Value cannot be null. Parameter name: val” (or Parameter name: oldValue)

March 29, 2011 Orchestration Issue If you get this mysterious error in a BizTalk orchestration: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: val If you are running an orchestration, then a potential problem is that you tried to set a “distinguished field” to the value of NULL. How I hit this error today ? I had […]

Slick Trick in BizTalk Admin Console

I don’t think I ever even tried the left and right arrows in BizTalk Admin Console until this week.  A voice called to may saying “click me”, “click me”. BizTalk Admin console can be notoriously slow; sometimes I keep two of them open, one to restart host instances, and the other to deal with applications, […]

How do you specify a SQL port number with the WCF-SQL adapter?

My client uses a non-standard SQL port number. So for example, when connecting in SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), we type in “MyServer,1234” for the server name. This also works in connection strings (i.e. specify servername, then comma, then port number. I suppose if you were using a named instance, it would be “MyServer/MyInstance,1234”. But […]