Have you done more than trivial mapping using the Biztalk Mapper? Check out the (second) video on Channel 9 featuring Eddie Churchill. In this video he's showing off the stuff he demoed during his session at PDC. Productivity goes up another notch.

The only question left to ask is "When?"

Transacted NTFS
Perform file operations in a transaction. Haven't had the need myself but I can certainly imagine scenarios where this would be a great technology to have.

IIS7
The metabase is no more. The configuration for sites being hosted in IIS7 is done from the web.config. This makes deploying a site to a different server even easier than it is at the moment.
IIS7 divided into a great number of different modules. Only the modules that are required by the sites that are hosted on the server need to be loaded, so this provides a benefit to both performance and security. It is possible to create your own modules using the same interface as is being used by the IIS-team itself. (For the Apache-fans: yes, I know this is sort of like what Apache does already.)

Biztalk Futures
This wasn't mentioned in any of the keynotes, but in a breakout on the roadmap for Biztalk they demoed different improvements that are being developed. For anyone that uses Biztalk for real projects, these features will provide a huge improvement in productivity.

• When selecting a field or functoid in the mapper only the related nodes will be highlighted and automagically moved into the view.
• Finding the related field on the other side of the map. Select a field and hit shift; the mapper will suggest a corresponding field based on the name of the field.
• Relating port, channels, maps, etc.: they showed a single design-surface where all of the artificats are visible. This way the relation between these artificats becomes clear; no more swichting between different tools to setup a message transfer. This will make it a whole lot easier to 'grasp' an entire solution in a single glance.

This was one of the coolest demos I saw at this PDC (up to now at least..). There should also be a video on Channel9 on this subject. (Update: Although I haven't had a change to watch it myself, I reckon this should be it)

Both interoperability and extensibility have been the recurring themes during the last few days. Microsoft seems to be taking the critism that they haven't be known for 'open' systems and protocols to heart.
Indigo (aka WCF) supports the applicable WS-* standards; Vista is set to use RSS (anyone remember CDF?); Infocard supports X509 and everyone can issue their own tickets using the WS-specs on which Infocard relies.

All these developments continue to make this a great platform for developing solutions.

Very early this morning I fixed an issue we were having with sending messages over a HTTP-transport. As the final step in the orchestration the result was posted back to an existing application. Although the entire chain worked, larger messages would be sent by Biztalk but would never be picked up by the application.

Initially we assumed that this was the result of IIS limiting the maximum number of bytes in a single request. After changing a lot of different settings, we finally found the reason:

• When the message-size is over 48Kb Biztalk uses chunked encoding to post the messages
• The receiving application was written in 'classic ASP'; ASP does not deal with chunked encoding very well.

After installing Biztalk SP1 it is possible to disable chunked encoding for the HTTP-transport. Look at this article for more details on how to do this.

Biztalk comes with a fair amount of functoids included; recently I encountered a situation where the function I needed wasn't available in the collection of functoids. Although I haven't created any custom functoids for the old versions, I must say that creating a functoid for BTS 2004 is very simple.

The function I was looking for, was being able to apply a Regular Expression to a value and to return the first match. The actual code that provides this function is very simple, but it might be a nice starting point for creating your own functoids. The sources can be found here: RegExFunctoids.zip (16,59 KB)

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<note_to_self>
When adding the MSMQT-adapter, a message is shown that it's not possible to uninstall the adapter. This doesn't seem to be very important ... what you should remember is that this will torch the 'regular' MSMQ. Save a couple of hours and think this over.
</note_to_self>

<note_to_self>
Enterprise SSO - When this happens:
SSO AUDIT
Function: GetConfigInfo
Tracking ID: fb5fe349-6437-4773-ac42-5582a6114aea
Client Computer: pareto53 (BTSNTSvc.exe:3616)
Client User: PARETO53\BtsService
Application Name: {B57ABA8F-AB28-4BE8-A759-90516B8EFFB2}
Error Code: 0x80070005, Access is denied.

Do this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\
Create the following Registry Key [RPC]
Under that create a new DWORD value called [EnableAuthEpResolution]
Set the value of this new value to [1]

</note_to_self>
</post>