I finally started a nice project in BizTalk 2004. [Unfortunately I cant reveal more about it, but you'll have to take my word that its going to be really cool - as if you cared :-)].
We rolled up our sleeves, fired up the XML Schema Editor and ...... crash landed into a bug (or some odd behavior.. maybe it was just us). The thing is, while creating schema B, we could not create a Child Record and assign it to Schema A, although the namespaces were the same for both A and B. Funnily enough in the recently completed training course, there was a similiar exercise which worked perfectly. I looked around for articles on the net and all the posts about this took it for granted that it just worked (i.e) - click on the element, go to the properties window and choose the required schema from the Data Structure Type drop down. Unfortunately my Data Structure Type drop down only shows xs:any and the current schema under construction.
Anyway, after some lost hair, we switched to XML Spy 2005, created the schema there and imported it into BizTalk. We also found that Spy 2005 has the ability to create BizTalk schemas (given a sample XML file) directly, but since we didnt have a sample file available, we just hand crafted the schema.
I dont know what to make of it. I had just finished telling a colleague (and team mate) about the 'glories of BizTalk and its 'real nice' schema editor and this happened. He found it rather funny.
Let's see.I'll try again next week when I have some time.
Scott Woodgate has emphasised in earlier posts that the 2006 in "BizTalk 2006" clearly means it will be released in 2006. So why is MS muddying the waters with this press release, saying that it will be in Nov 2005 along with Whidbey and Yukon?
I suppose they mean information about BTS 2006 will be made available at the time of this launch (for those who arent upto speed on whats happening in the BizTalk world) but the wording is rather confusing.
I got a flood of nearly 50 spam messages in a single day (a couple of days ago) and Donny Mack has said that they definitely are doing something ASAP. So i'm waiting.
Anyway, on the lines of my previous post on Whitehorse extensibility, here's my postulation on extending the class designer. My idea is to use the class designer and with OR mapping principles, make it generate a database design.
The generation will have to highly customizable because DDL generation is a highly sensitive thing for database folk and from personal experience i know that some OR mappers (that take class design as input) generate some primitive DDL thats quite useless.
It should be interesting to take this further into XML message design and so on.