EXILE (official web site in Japanese) is currently a very popular band. They have produced a limited number of records under the name "EXILE" (four, one being a conceptual album and one track on a compilation of multiple artists) but are an unusual band...

Every once in a while, someone posts on microsoft.public.biztalk a question about processing Office files in BizTalk. Sometimes it is Word documents, sometimes it is Excel workbooks. This post explains a typical trap you should not fall in and why. ...

Dream is a Japanese POP band. It first appeared on January 1st, 2000 when the large Japanese record company Avexnet ( official web site in Japanese ) held a contest to find the most talented young female singers. Three girls won the Grand Prize (in Japanese...

In a previous entry , I outlined how flat files with delimited records can be parsed by the flat file disassembler. Another post on microsoft.public.biztalk.general attracted my attention. Let's help Norbert disassemble his file. The document to disassemble...

This article on mainichi left me speechless...

As many of you know, BizTalk Server 2004 can represent messages as either XSD schemas or .NET classes . The most common approach is to use an XSD schema. If you choose to use a .NET class to represent a message, remember that the BizTalk 2004 engine...

Today, yet another post on Microsoft.public.biztalk.nonxml caught my attention. In this post, the out of the box flat file disassembler is used to parse a file looking like: | 20040511| AAAA | 138| 1012101 | 20040511| BBBBBBB | 11111117| 1101701 Observe...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The real work happens here. This is the implementation of IDisassemblerComponent . At this point, it is probably useful to review the definition of this interface at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/sdk/htm/frlrfmicrosoftbiztalkcomponentinteropidisassemblercomponentmemberstopic...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The constructor initializes a few needed objects. Among them, we have three regular expressions that will help us parse the flat file. Those regular expressions are not perfect and I am sure anyone can improve them to parse the exact...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 There are many different format of business documents. Recently, a post on microsoft.public.biztalk.nonxml caught my attention. The author receives a flat file with name/value pairs organized in tables. The flat file looks like...

The BizTalk 2004 Assembly Viewer is a handy tool to visualize deployed BizTalk artifacts. It is not configured by default but it can be configured easily by registering a DLL (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/deploying/htm/ebiz_depl_assemblies_pade...

O-Zone, a boy's band from Romania has been number one in Italy a few months ago. While this is not the kind of music I listen to, I must admit that the video-clip made my day. When I first saw it, I enjoyed seeing the band singing on the wing...

BizTalk 2004 FTP adapter allows administrators to specify Before/After PUT (or GET) commands. This is usually helpful to change the default directory after the initial FTP login. Some folks have tried FTP commands like cd dirname without success. It fails...

Personally, I do not see anything special on this picture of the moon! Many Chinese and Japanese people see a rabbit instead of a smiling face and they believe it is making rice cakes (mochi). Maybe this is because the word “ mochizuki “...

BizTalk Adapters have two parts: the Run-Time part and the Design Time part. The Run-Time part is responsible for the actual message exchange (i.e. it sends and/or receives actual messages). The Design-Time part allows administrators to access properties...

A few days ago I suggested that if people were interested, I could explain how to write a BizTalk 2004 adapter and demonstrate the concepts by building a POP3 adapter. BizTalk 2004 ships with the Adapter Framework ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/library...

Most Computer Aided Design applications (like Microsoft Office Visio 2003) present users with a design surface where various objects can be dragged and dropped. When the user clicks on the graphical of an object on the screen, the application has to locate...

Here is where I abuse my status of Blogger to determine what topics you would prefer me to talk about! I am planning a few posts on how to write a POP3 adapter for BizTalk 2004 using the Adapter Framework ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/sdk...