Scott Woodgate has posted a series of documents in his blog about the new features for BizTalk Server 2006. One of the improvements for the developer tools is the new Flat File wizard, which makes it easier to create schemas for flat files by using a specified flat file instance as a base. Each iteration of the wizard allows further refinement of record and field definitions. For each iteration, you can specify information such as whether the data is positional or delimited, tags and element names. The wizard then parses the sample flat file instance to determine number of child elements, element offsets, placement of delimiters (i.e. prefix, infix, postfix), etc. Once the wizard completes you get a flat file schema that can be edited in the BizTalk schema editor. You can also relaunch the wizard to redefine a given record. Check out a detailed description here, and give us your feedback.
