Biztalk 2004 Integration Experiences

Monday, June 27, 2005

Calling FlatFile Parser/Serializer Directly from an Orchestration

I was reading some Biztalk Server 2006 documentation and one of the feature that caught me was invoking Pipelines directly from an Orchestration.For a sample on this please see a sample written by Stephen W. Thomas

It would be nice if I can do the same in Biztalk 2004. Unfortunately it's not that easy to do it in Biztalk 2004.

Currently one of my projects has an Orchestrations which has to convert to an xml file to a flat file and use a legacy component to perform an import. I had to use a send pipeline with loopback and configure the flat file disassembler in a receive pipeline to convert xml to flat file. This kind of seems expensive to me on MessageBox calls and decreases performance of the orchestration.

So as a first step to achieve calling pipelines from orchestration I wanted to at least call a Flat File Parser/Serializer directly from Orchestration. After digging deep into the Biztalk objects I was able to do this.

You can download the sample here. I'll be aslo uploading the samples to GotDotNet website

Let me know if you have any comments/suggestions/bugs

Thursday, June 16, 2005

BTS 2004 Disaster Recovery Guide

I was searching the Biztalk server product documentation and Microsoft web site to get a white paper on Disaster Recovery for Biztalk 2004 but I couldn't find one. While searching that I found an interesting article posted on Sydney Biztalk user group.

Check it out here

It looks like a unpublished white paper from Microsoft and It's been contributed to the user group by a Microsoft guy.

It has all the valuable information on preparing the server for Disaster Recovery. I would say it's a must for production environments.