Jan Tielens' Bloggings : BizTalk, SharePoint

Tip: Right Click => Add DLL to GAC

Jan Tielens — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 20:10:00 GMT

[Via Patrick Wellink] Easier way to add a DLL to the GAC

Add following text to a .reg file, double click it, voila: you can add assemblies to the GAC with only two mouse clicks! BizTalk and SharePoint developers will love it. Check out the BIA blog post to download the .reg file in a zip.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\gacutil\command]
@="c:\\windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v1.1.4322\\gacutil.exe /i \"%1\""

BizTalk Adapter for SharePoint Version 2

Jan Tielens — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:01:00 GMT

This is good news! There is a new version of the BizTalk Adapter for SharePoint released on the GotDotNet Workspace. It seems that the adapter was launched at TechEd USA, you can view the web cast online over here (including a demo of the BizTalk 2006 Adapter). Here is my little summary:

Features of V2:

Side by side install with V1 (no upgrade scenario)
Exposes properties in Context (like originating folder etc.)
Security Credentials per Endpoint (also accessible through context properties!)
Binary file support (!)

BizTalk 2006 WSS Adapter:

Includes all features of V2
Integrated setup, configuration, and deployment experience
Support of Form library, View, and List
Integrated Office InfoPath experience

Building Workflow Solutions Article … Where’s the Code?

Jan Tielens — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 10:17:00 GMT

In the current issue of .NET Magazine an article written by Patrick and me has been published, titled “Bouwen van Workflow-toepassingen” (Building Workflow Solutions). At this point the article is only available in Dutch, but I’m working on an English translation. Anyway, I was showing off the article to my wife as it appeared to me that in the article wasn’t a single line of code! No big deal you might think, but the article goes through all the steps needed to build a workflow solution based on the following products:

InfoPath 2003 SP1
Windows SharePoint Service
BizTalk Server 2004
SharePoint Adaptor of BizTalk

Basically the steps needed to create such a workflow solution are: create your InfoPath form, publish it to a SharePoint Forms Library, create your orchestration (workflow) in BizTalk, use the SharePoint Adapter to connect your orchestration to the SharePoint Forms Library. None of these steps require you to write a single line of code!

By the way, if speak Dutch and you’re not yet subscribed to the .NET Magazine do it now! It’s completely free and each issue has a lot of interesting articles, columns and interviews.

Creating InfoPath Processing Instructions in BizTalk Server 2004

Jan Tielens — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:34:00 GMT

InfoPath has a little bit of magic in it. I’m not talking about the cool features for creating and using rich XML based forms, but I mean the magic that happens when you save the contents of an InfoPath form in a XML file. Although the result is just a file with the XML extension, it seems even the Windows Explorer is enchanted, it displays an InfoPath icon for the XML file. When double click the file, InfoPath will be opened, the corresponding InfoPath form will be loaded and the data from the XML file is showed in the form.

So what’s causing of all this wizardry? If you open the XML file with Visual Studio.NET for example so we can see the actual XML content, you can see that are some XML directives (starting with ?mso) that you wouldn’t expect:

These tags are called Processing Instructions (PIs). Processing instructions are used to provide information in an XML document that the XML parser passes on to the calling application. PIs are primarily used to tell an application how to handle the data contained within an XML document. PIs must begin with an identifier called a target, which follows rules similar to those for element (XML element: An XML structure that consists of a start tag, an end tag, and the information between the tags. Elements can have attributes and can contain other elements.) and attribute (XML attribute: An XML structural construct. A name-value pair, separated by an equal sign and included in a tagged element, that modifies features of an element. All attribute values are text strings and must be enclosed in quotation marks.) names. Targets are case-sensitive and must start with a letter or underscore. The rest of the target can contain letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores, periods, and colons. Any valid XML textual characters can appear after the target. PIs can be placed anywhere in an XML document outside of other markup. They can be placed in the prolog, following the root element, or within the value of an element. They are usually placed in an XML document's prolog. (description from Office Online) Notice that the PIs also contain a reference to the published InfoPath form. In the example the form is located on my hard disk, but in real-world scenario’s it probably would have been in SharePoint or a file share.

So what got these PIs to do with BizTalk? Yesterday Scott Woodgate briefly mentioned the importance of the PIs in his webcast about BizTalk and InfoPath: when BizTalk picks up a message originating from InfoPath, the PIs could get lost when you process the message. Or if you have a BizTalk orchestration that would construct a new InfoPath message, you will probably want to add the PIs to that message so InfoPath will be used when the message is opened by a user. The first scenario is when you transform an InfoPath XML message using the BizTalk Mapper. By default the PIs will get lost, so the resulting message won’t have the PIs, but you can easily change this. There’s a property for the Grid of the map: “Copy Processing Instructions“; if you set this to Yes, PIs will be preserved in the new message.

A second way of adding PIs to a message in BizTalk is using expressions. You can write following code in an Expression or Assignment shape:
NewExpense = Expense;
NewExpense(XMLNORM.ProcessingInstructionOption) = 1;
NewExpense(XMLNORM.ProcessingInstruction) = "<?mso-infoPathSolution solutionVersion=\"1.0.0.1\" productVersion=\"11.0.6250\" PIVersion=\"1.0.0.0\" href=\"file:///C:\\InfoPath\\ExpenseReport.xsn\" name=\"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:ExpenseReport:-myXSD-2004-04-20T07-24-16\" ?><?mso-application progid=\"InfoPath.Document\"?>";
The value of the ProcessingInstructionOption property can be used as follows:

0: New processing instructions from the XML Assembler are appended to the processing instructions at the beginning of the document.
1: New processing instructions from the XML Assembler overwrite existing processing instructions at the beginning of the document.
2: Processing instructions at the beginning of the document are removed.

Finally the third way of adding PIs is using a custom send pipeline. Add a new Send Pipeline to your BizTalk project and in the Assemble Stage of the pipeline add a XML Assembler. Now you can set the “Add processing instructions text” property of that XML Assembler to the desired PIs. To every message send through this send pipeline, the PIs will be attached.

Conclusion? InfoPath and BizTalk work great together! Like Scott said: “InfoPath is to BizTalk as Outlook is to Exchange“. Check out his blog post about the webcast for more examples about InfoPath and BizTalk. If you've missed the webcast yesterday you can watch it on-demand when it becomes available (usually in 72 hours). Btw, there are a lot of intresting webcasts comming.

New SharePoint and BizTalk Resources (some important ones!)

Jan Tielens — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 07:20:00 GMT

Is hard to keep up with the new releases of documentation, updates, ... Microsoft (and others) is releasing each day. Here are the new ones I discovered this morning:

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Online Documentation (Last updated: April 2, 2004)
BizTalk Server 2004 Help is updated on a quarterly basis. Each release of BizTalk Server 2004 Help includes more in-depth information, updates and corrections, and new topics in areas such as migration, deployment, and samples.
BizTalk Server 2004 Tutorial
The BizTalk Server Tutorial contains detailed information about how Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 can be used within your company to facilitate Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and among business partners to automate business-to-business processes.
BizTalk Orchestration Naming Conventions
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Help
Help for using the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Administrator's Guide
Guide for installing, configuring, managing, and maintaining Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
SharePoint Configuration Analyzer v1.0 for Windows SharePoint Services
SharePoint Configuration Analyzer is a diagnostic tool that verifies settings on your server that are critical to running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and to hosting Web Parts on your server.
SharePoint Document Library Event Handler Toolkit
The SharePoint Document Library Event Handler Toolkit introduces developers to the Windows SharePoint Services list events feature for document libraries. The download consists of two projects, SampleEventSinks and the WSS Event Monitor. The SampleEventSinks project contains several sample event sinks; the WSS Event Monitor is a stand-alone application that will display events as they occur on a document library. [via Mark Harrison]