BizTalk Best Practices (Handling Large Projects)

1. Use common .snk (key file) on all development machines so that you can uniquely qualify an assembly across all machines.

2. If you have used any helper utility or external assembly then make a shared network drive and put the build of your assembly (.dll) in that. Other people can use them without making a build on their local machine.

3. Avoid use of parallel shapes wherever possible. Its helps you in fast debugging of orchestrations and also gives best performance (scenario based).

4. If your development is going on multiple machines then use one master development server where you can configure and run full solution. Always use binding file of this master server to deploy orchestrations on test server.

Handling Different Encodings in BizTalk Server 2004

BizTalk Server 2004 supports many different encodings for XML and flat file documents, for example UTF-16, UTF-8, Simplified Chinese GBK, Simplified Chinese GB18030, and so on.

For inbound documents, BizTalk Server can recognize the encoding declaration in XML documents, such as "". The flat file schema has a Code Page property to indicate the encoding of the inbound flat file documents.

For outbound documents, XML and flat file assemblers use the Target charset property. If this property is specified, BizTalk Server converts the outbound documents to the specified character set regardless of the original one. If no Target charset property is set, XML uses the UTF-8 protocol and flat files use the code page specified in the flat file schema.

­Example

Let say we have “£” in our incoming source.

This symbol you can define using ISO-8859-1 encoding.

So make your inbound document like this and as said BizTalk server recognize all standard encodings so the schema that you have created in BizTalk would successfully recognize this xml as valid.

?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?
ns0:Root xmlns:ns0="http://MapTrial.Incoming"
Name>transfering £ 500/ns0:Root>