My BizTalk Decompiler only works with Reflector 4. The updated version for Reflector 5 has been available for a while on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins

All date/time tracked by BAM must be expressed in UTC. BAM depends on this to provide accurate durations, among many other things. This is clearly explained here . It was also the case for BizTalk 2004 even if the documentation gave subtle hints instead of describing it : es.UpdateActivity("PurchaseOrder...

If you have installed BAM (BizTalk Server 2004 or BizTalk Server 2006), you may have noticed that a web service called the "BAM Query Service" got installed. As its name hints, this web service allows the BAM Portal to retrieve BAM instance data without connecting directly to a SQL server. This...

Visit it here . Kris, Steve, Michael and Mark share product updates, links to training materials and even employment opportunities ! I subscribed to their RSS feed.

In a previous post , I described the home page of the new BAM Portal. Today, let's take a look at the Instance Search feature. The instance search allows you to search BAM data for a particular activity instance: You can add / remove clauses using the "Add" / "Remove" buttons. You can also build...

You probably already read Scott's document on what is new in Business Activity Monitoring 2006 .Today, I'll shed some light on the brand new "out of the box" portal. All information are based on the CTP build you might have picked up at TechEd 2005. Keep in mind that the BAM Portal may (and probably...

Make sure you pick up a copy of BizTalk Server 2006 CTP (Community Technology Preview) . Starting next week, I will start a serie of deep dive posts on some of the new BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) features ... Staty tuned!

BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 was released today. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=f4a5ab9e-d599-4cc8-abdf-ae6ae68bac3d .

Since Virtual Server has been released, I got asked the question several times so I figured I'd put the answer here where everybody can find it. Knowledge Base Article 842301 says something like: Current released versions of BizTalk (2000, 2002 ,2004) in any flavor (Enterprise, Developer ...) are...

Knowledge Base Article 838454 describes the new Microsoft.BizTalk.MessageBoxOM.MessageArchive object that was added to Microsoft.BizTalk.MessageBoxOM.dll . Currently, the package is only available through Microsoft Support. There are a few things that this KB Article does not describe: remember that...

You might have received this error message if you followed these steps: Install BizTalk 2004 on a clean machine with Visual Studio .NET 2003, Start Visual Studio and Create a new C# project (Windows Application for instance), Save the solution/Project, Right click on the project name in...

Yet another frequently asked question. When using the BizTalk 2004 Administration Console, isolated hosts always report "Status unavailable" (see below). BizTalk Server 2004 offers two kind of hosts: In-Process Hosts and Isolated Hosts. In-Process Hosts run in the same process as BizTalk...

Today, we continue our deep dive into the undocumented and unsupported bowels of the BizTalk artifacts compiler and examine how pipelines get compiled to .NET assemblies. Pipelines allow to adjust the format of inbound messages to something that is suitable for processing. There are two kind of pipelines...

Recently, I shed some light on how Maps are compiled to .NET assemblies . Perhaps one of the most asked question on microsoft.public.biztalk.* is " Calling a map from C# or VB.NET? ". This post attempts to answer that question and clarifies a few things. It is possible to run a map produced by the...

Today, we dive deeply into the undocumented and unsupported bowels of the BizTalk artifacts compiler and examine how maps get compiled to .NET assemblies. The BizTalk 2004 Mapper allows to graphically build a transformation between an XML instance of an input schema to another XML instance conforming...

Today, we explore some undocumented (and therefore not supported) internal parts of BizTalk 2004. When a BizTalk project is compiled, artifacts like Messages, Orchestrations, Pipelines, Maps or Schemas (to mention only a few) are compiled into a .NET assembly. In the assembly, one type represents one...

A while back, I presented my Archiver Component . It archives messages as they enter a receive pipeline or right before they leave a send pipeline. It turns out that "DT" found a problem with this component (thank you for reporting this). I have updated the original entry and fixed the code. The error...

Martijn has a very nice pipeline component wizard for Visual Studio .NET 2003. You can download it here .

Sometimes, business applications encode their data by specifying a message type in the file's header. The body's layout changes depending on the message type. When you receive such messages in BizTalk, you are facing the problem of having to disassemble a flat file according to two or more different...

I have not been able to post as much as I wanted to recently. I have been working on the future of BizTalk. This includes dreaming about what would be the perfect product, discuss multiple possible feature sets, write architecture documents, implement prototypes and demos and much more. All of this...

In a previous post , I outlined the reasons why using the Office Object Model on the server is a bad idea. Some readers pointed out that third parties sell components which can understand Word/Excel/Access/Project files and convert them to XML. I personally do not like the idea of processing an Office...

As many of you already know, your custom pipeline component can expose properties by implementing IPersitPropertyBag . You can then specify the value of these properties at design time, in Visual Studio .NET 2003 and when your component is initialized, it receives values via the IPersistPropertyBag.Load...

Regularly, in microsoft.public.biztalk newsgroups, folks would like to archive messages as they are received by BizTalk, before any further processing. There are numerous ways to achieve this and the most obvious ones (non exhaustive list): When the orchestration starts, have it send the message to a...

Ah, believe it or not, my mailbox fills up with requests for help! Oh, well. Today, some folks which I assume would like to remain anonymous are puzzled by a custom disassembling pipeline problem. Let's see if we can help them. Here is the e-mail I received, formatted to fit this page. I took the liberty...

I sometimes receive e-mails from BizTalk developers asking me to solve their specific problem. Recently, I received an e-mail from Nic asking about some flat file disassembling issues. This is great feedback, keep it coming guys! If you have a specific question, I would prefer you to post to newsgroups...