Got a great tip from a colleague that i wanted to share with you. Do the following steps
- Open up a command prompt at "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\Developer Tools" and
- do a Regsvr32 BTSAsmExt.dll
Now in Windows Explorer along with Control Panel etc, you can see a new option titled "Biztalk Server Assemblies". Double click the assembly and it shows you the dependencies on the left pane and the components on the right hand side. For assemblies which contain schemas double clicking the XSD will open up a little browser to view the XSD.
This is pretty cool and saves the bother of having to open up the Biztalk Server Explorer every time and gives more info this way too.
Oh and by the way, before i forget, if you havent looked at the documentation for the Biztalk.ExplorerOM.dll, do that now. Its waay coool and shows how powerful and deep the object model is. We made use of it recently when writing some custom steps for BizUnit (more on that later , its almost midnight and i gotta go crash) and it really grabbed me. Now i've got plans for that baby!! :-)
A personal milestone.Following on from my talk at the VBUG local meeting a couple of months ago, I've now been invited to present an "Introduction to Biztalk" session at the VBUG 2006 conference. Im really excited about this. I think the timing is quite perfect too. We are currently exploring a move to v2006 and looking at how it can be used with VSTS, Software Factories etc and i think theres just about enough time to find out some useful stuff and present it along with the experience we've had so far with v2004. The session will feature both Biztalk 2004 and 2006, since the development experience is pretty much the same, with some improvements overall in 2006 (flat file wizard, publishing orchestrations as webservices, consuming webservices returning arrays, error message routing and so on). The major area however is the changes in deployment so that should get some coverage as well. We've also been working quite a lot with BizUnit and have written some custom steps in an 'extension' DLL project and im hoping to put that up for download after the conference. Stay tuned for more info.