Duplicating a SendPort in BizTalk

Sometimes, you want to create a new SendPort that is an exact clone or duplicate of another one in BizTalk Admin Console. In July, 2014, Richard Seroter provided a BizTalk SendPort Duplicator tool to do this for you. So I recommend you check it out, but in this blog, I want to go through the […]

Missing or Blank “Script Assembly” in Functoid

Had a case today where I opened BizTalk Map, and the three fields “Script Assembly”, “Script Class”, and “Script Method” for a “Scripting Functoid” were all blank.  The “Select script type” was set to “External Assembly” (meaning a C# .DLL that you usually write yourself).  Yet I could compile and deploy the orchestration  Below is […]

A Closer Look at BizTalk Xpath – What is a Predicate?

Have you ever been confused by the long XPaths found in BizTalk? XPath is a great syntax used to select or query XML and return XML nodes or specific element/attribute values. XPath is good to know for BizTalk, .NET programming, and XSLT. Example 1 For example, look at the schema below. If you click on […]

XmlTextReader causes “Root element is missing” in BizTalk Send Pipeline

I recently wrote a pipeline that needed to access the data, in order to use that data for setting one of the context properties (I can explain why in a future blog).  In the past, I might have used XmlDoc.Load and used XPath to process the document, but these days, I’m more savvy on how […]

BizTalk Build – unknown system exception

While there can probably be many reasons for this error, here’s one that I had: msgNew() = “http://MySite.com/MyApp/MyService.svc”; There was not value in the parentheses. For some reason, this does NOT put the red exclamation point on the Message Assignment shape.   I had been testing the following, then changed it, and forgot and left […]

Link to Streaming Archiving Pipeline Component

Pipeline components are an advanced aspect of BizTalk often overlooked or often implemented in a manner that breaks the careful streaming model of BizTalk Server.  Implementing pipeline components in a truly stream based way allows BizTalk to process messages of arbitrary and effectively unlimited size.  This example shows how to use a stream to archive received […]

Online XPath Tester

XpatherTester.com is the current “go to” tool I use when I want to test XPath (online and for free). I prefer the one built-in to Stylus Studio, but that’s a paid for product that I cannot install on each client’s computer. To actually learn XPath, I suggest the W3Schools site: http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xpath_intro.asp To test the tool, […]

Parsing and Handling SoapFaults in a BizTalk Orchestration

One of the characteristics that separates the good from the great Biztalk developers and architects, is handling of errors, particularly SOAP errors.  This is often not tested sufficiently. This blog by Shashidharan Krishnan does a good job of explaining how to catch a SOAP error in a BizTalk Orchestration: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalknotes/archive/2013/02/12/how-to-handle-fault-message-in-biztalk-server.aspx I’d like to throw in […]