Posts

Alan Smith has a fairly dated (2004), but useful post on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective BizTalkers. Alan’s article has inspired me to discover what else help make an “effective BizTalk developer”… a work in progress. Update: Marty Wasznicky and Scott Zimmerman have put together a quality article published in May 2007 MSDN Magazine called 8 Tips And Tricks For Better BizTalk Programming. This article offers a number of seasoned tips which I found to be very insightful, such as the “always use multi-part message types” tip. Check it out here. ...

Last week I was involved with the maintenance of a class library responsible for validating a message against its schema. This was being invoked from an orchestration. As an older utility library, was based on .NET 1.1 base classes (e.g. XmlValidatingReader) and took in an XLANGMessage parameter to extract both the message content and the associated schema (as per the BizTalk message definition). For various reasons the XLANGMessage dependency was to be broken, and some 2.0 optimisation put in place. In my experience, I have never had the need to do XSD validation straight from an orchestration — so the real need for this still escapes me. ...

DebugView: An indispensable utility from SysInternals. I use it as a UI for BizTalk, by printing debug information using System.Diagnostics.Debug with its default trace listener, messages end up getting fed into the Win32 OutputDebugString function. DebugView monitors and displays this debug output in realtime. TCPTrace: Tunnels packets between a client and server, and displays the payload. Unreal for tracing HTTP traffic between web services, WCF endpoints, and so on. XPathMania: Extends the VS.NET 2005 XML Editor, by providing a “scratch pad” to enter and execute XPath queries against the active document. ...

In the drive for gathering tips and tricks from industry experts and maintaining a “fresher” awareness of BizTalk developments, I have added the following (active) BizTalk centric blogs to my news aggregator. I am amazed at the number of BizTalk gems I have already picked up… Richard Seroter Patrick Wellink Charles Young Ben Cops Jeff Lynch Jesus Rodriguez Jon Flanders Mick Badran Alan Smith Kevin Lam Demystifying Direct Bound Ports Marco Ensing Martijn Hoogendoorn Matt Meleski Scott Colestock Stephen Thomas

I stumbled upon this nifty online quiz, linked to on Laurence Timms blog. This is what it said. What extension are you?

A few weeks ago we had a WSE 2.0 send port fail—resulting in the suspension of hundreds of service instances. Resumption of these suspended WSE instances resulted in a consistent general BTSException, with little useful detail. Sadly, due to lack of access to the production environment, the root cause of this problem remains a mystery. It was requested that the message part content for each be extracted for further analysis, and manual rectification. While not huge numbers, this would prove to be a tedious and monotonous task for our sysops administrator. ...

Updated: 2022-01-23 I finally (2007) bit the bullet and commited to learning a real text editor. Having muddled on and off with vi since the late 90s, decided on Vim. Once you break through its initial, steep, learning curve its truly life changing. Level up and become a text surgeon today. Vim is incredibly customisable. Its important to take the time to craft your own vimrc. Type :options to understand the various levers you can pull to make Vim your editor. Almost 15 years later, I’m still constantly fine tuning things. ...

As a follow up to previous post [The Servlet API]({% post_url 2007-02-20-servlet-api %}), this post aims to sweeps over some fundamentals of JSP, a technology which thanks to its simple yet extensible design, still to this day, underpins many modern web application frameworks. JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a technology that helps software developers create dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types. Released in 1999 by Sun Microsystems. ...

As you start out building Java web applications, you soon find that it sit upon several well designed building blocks. Once the penny drops, and an intuition about these building blocks is gained, creating web apps on Java becomes a delight. Two key, top level concepts are the mighty Servlet API and JavaServer Pages (JSP). These are deployed to a Web container, also commonly referred to a Servlet (or Web) container. ...