Two great articles about the Oracle adapter

Last week I had to help a collegue with the Oracle adapter. To get started I used the following 2 articles:

Richard Seroter's Walkthrough

Wilfried Mausz's Oracle adapter demo

These two articles and some general BizTalk knowledge helped me to understand most of the Oracle adapter in very little time.

Sharing knowledge rocks! Thanks guys!

Another new book: 'First Steps: Developing BizTalk Applications'

Apress released another book about BizTalk.

Here's the description:
First Steps: Developing BizTalk Applications is a primer to most other introductory Biztalk books. If you feel like traditional beginning books are too abstract, and that you are mired in detail and missing the "big picture," check out this book. It's not a reference -- it's a jumpstart to learning Biztalk. You learn about the product in a phased approach. This way, you learn just what you need to know, when you need to know it. And the entire book is example-based: you learn by doing. Each phase provides detailed instructions for creating, deploying, and testing a BizTalk project. Through the book's projects, you will be exposed to orchestrations, pipelines, maps, schemas, messages, ports, shapes, the BizTalk Server Administration console, and the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) tool.

UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter: '192' is not a valid value for Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType

As stated by other BizTalk developers as well, I think the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter is a great tool! It creates a good looking .CHM file which documents your entire BizTalk installation.

Unfortunately I found another error, or actually Brent Anderson did. He found out that when you have either or both Track Message Properties enabled on a Send port, the Documenter does not generate the documentation.

fig. 1 – Send Port Properties

The Documenter shows the following popup:


fig. 2 – Error popup

Under the hoods (with DebugView), the UK SDC Documenter gives more information:

TraceErr : Microsoft.Sdc.BiztalkDocumenter.Documenter.GenerateDocumentation: System.InvalidOperationException:

There was an error generating the XML document. ---> System.InvalidOperationException:

Instance validation error: '192' is not a valid value for Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType.

Research learned that the values from the Track Message properties, don't match the values from the enumeration Microsoft.Sdc.BizTalkOM.TrackingType, resulting in the error above.

Depending on which of the Track Message Properties are checked, another value will appear in the error message.

The consequence of this is that, until the bug is solved, it is not possible to use the documenter as long as you have one of the Track Message Properties checked.

I can't wait for the next release J

Error while using the UK SDC Documenter as a Post build event

We were contacted by Brent Anderson from RBA Consulting. He ran into some errors while using the UK SDC BizTalk 2006 Documenter as a post build event.

Error initialising documentation publisher
Brent found out that using the documenter in a post build event works fine, as long as you just use the /def[ault] parameter.
When we tried to use the /o[utput] parameter (to set another output directory), we were confronted with an 'Error initialising documentation publisher'. We also tried other parameters, but that resulted in the same error.

Solution
After some research we found out that when you want to use other parameters, than the /def[ault] parameter, you must supply the /p:chm parameter to make sure the document publisher can be initialized.