The morning was spent completing the biztalk build and config on the dev boxes being used. The sourcesafe repository was copied over and by mid morning we were up and running with builds on the dev boxes. During the afternoon we tested each of the 3 designs against a standard "out of the box" config - this ran on a single 4-way biztalk box and a super ......

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Windows Workflow Foundation has been officially announced at the PDC. Get a load of this, from Darren Jeffords blog; For those of you familiar with BizTalk Server 2004, Windows Workflow Foundation is analogous to the Orchestration Designer and Orchestration Runtime (XLANG) in BizTalk. It allows you express your “workflow” using a designer ......

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The following is an extract from a thread at msnusers.com/biztalkservers... Charles Young explains with great clarity the subtle differences in the rules engine parsing of facts expressed using XPath Selector and XPath Field combinations (or “facts” and “slots”); This causes so much confusion. The rules engine works by asserting ......

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It’s been a busy week. I’ve been on holiday for only a week and it’s going to take the best part of a day to catch up with voicemails, emails, and blogs via bloglines. Apart from almost breaking my foot in NJ (long story) and the Yankees going down to their biggest defeat at the hands of the Red Sox, it was a nice break. Some essential ......

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The more I work with the Rules API the more I'm convinced that the Vocabulary element was only created for the BRC. The most generous I can be is that someone came up with a good idea for the BRC and "retrofitted" it for the API. There are two reasons for this; The API is unsupported and undocumented. The BRL (Business Rules Language) can function happily ......

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I don’t know about you but I find the best way to understand how something is working is from reading the code and then stepping through its execution, with VS’s trusty local and immediate windows. A friend of mine calls this “developers documentation”, and whilst I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s a substitute ......

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Has anybody seen a Vocabulary API for the rule engine? No? That's probably because it seems to either be on its way out or never made it in the first place. According to the BizTalk SDK "The following objects are exposed by Microsoft(r) BizTalk(r) Server 2004, but are not used in BizTalk Server programming." These include the following from the Microsoft.RuleEngine ......

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The BizTalk 2004 rules execution engine is "a discrimination network-based forward-chaining inference engine designed to optimize in-memory operation". Apparently. What I understand this to mean is that it can arrive at a decision based on reasoning of facts against conditions (inference), and that it reacts to new facts being "asserted" in a way which ......

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OK, so tell me we haven’t all done this at least once. We come across a way to improve our output efficiency, and at the same time to enforce good design and standards – we figure we should provide the rest of the team with a tool that can help them achieve the same. We feel, for a small and fleeting moment, that warm glow. Until someone ......

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I suppose my first entry in this blog should be some insightful post about the BizTalk Rules Engine (BRE). Sorry, move along please, nothing to see. You see, I want to record my journey through a whole new technology. The BRE is that technology. I’m lucky – I’ve been given the opportunity to specialise in one facet of a BizTalk, and ......

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