Using Data Source Names in BizTalk 2004 Maps
I just found something a little disconcerting in BizTalk 2004.
Under the older versions (2000, 2002) when using the database lookup functoid in a map, you could use DSN connections to make your maps portable and ease deployment to production. This worked because functoids would simply inject VBScript into the generated XSLT file.
This no longer works in 2004! It looks like functoids now inject inline C# and they no longer support DSNs. In my current project where we have dozens of maps with one or more lookups, this means we will have to edit the maps and recompile them everytime we go from dev->QA->staging->production. Ouch!
We asked Microsoft about htis and they said “So what? that's how we do it“
Not a satisfactory answer.... Obviously no one on the product team thought about this.
We ended up writing our own lookup functoid that uses a .config file to find the server and database name.
Sylvain