So, as a part of my current consulting assignment I’ve been asked to work out a way of documenting the integrations that are deployed in the BizTalk 2006 platform I’m working with. I’ve stumbled across a tool called BTM2HTML/BizTalk Map Documenter (a codeplex project), but the main problem with this tool is that it only documents BizTalk maps. Orchestrations or pipelines and so forth are left out of the equation. Also the presentation of the mapping wasn’t really useful to us, it was somewhere in between technical and end user friendly. A developer wouldn’t be happy with it because it’s too much of a user presentation and the user wouldn’t be happy with it because he/she wouldn’t understand it fully.

What I set out to find was some tool that would help me extract the generated XSLT from a BizTalk map (either from the .btm-file or the assembly) and preferably not require me to manually load over 1500 projects in one instance of Visual Studio (and then right-click every single map to select “Validate map”). After asking around I got this tip: BizTalk Server 2006 Documenter (also a codeplex project). This looked exactly like what I wanted! Everything in my BizTalk platform would be documented in detail and neatly packaged into one comprehensive file. Only problem: it threw an exception when I tried to document my local BizTalk server!

It turns out that the application (or well, rather the base library that the application uses (BizTalk OM, yup – another codeplex project)) has issues with multiple versions of the same binary being installed on the same BizTalk server (i.e. in the servers assembly cache (GAC)). For some weird reason a design decision was made to store the map names, orchestration names, pipeline names, schema names and assembly names without version information as keys in a hashtable. It comes to no surprise that when confronted with a second version of for example a pipeline the application will encounter an exception due to the fact that the name already exists as a key in the hashtable storing pipelines for the current BizTalk application.

So for the last couple of days I’ve tried to spend as much time as possible extending the base library so that it will be compatible with BizTalk installations that have multiple versions of the same map names, pipeline names, orchestration names and assembly names. To be brutally honest my solution isn’t the most elegant, but it works. All it does is append the version of the artefact in question to its name when the instance of the type is created. What should be done is rather some re-engineering of the way the class library is built and how the inner collections are stored. Also, I don’t know if I’ve missed some artefact type which should be extended in the same manner just because it isn’t used in our server.

I’ll see if I can get in touch with the persons responsible for the various bits and pieces I’ve changed in order to add my efforts to the project or atleast receive some feedback. If you should feel that my changes would make your life better before I’ve managed to add them to the official project you can always contact me through this blog and I’ll be happy to send you the code (or even the packaged installation) – the license permits this from what I can see.

(Of course there’s a slight chance that I’ve completely missed something about all this multi-version yahoo which solves my initial problem with the exception, but if so – I haven’t found it yet).

Today has been a fairly good day I must say. Through my current consulting assignment I’ve had the opportunity to write some code in a open source project (this might very well result in another blog post quite soon which I’ve written about here). I’ve also today received a bottle of champagne for the work I did with the photography at my employers summer party – I like! I also had a pretty interesting discussion about career options, not as in look for a new job but rather to think about how to profile myself and think about what’s up next. Oh, and I went to the hairdresser today – it was seven weeks in the working. =)

All these things combined have given me an unexpected jolt of positive energy, something I haven’t had in a long time. I suspect that a contributing factor is that I haven’t had a proper vacation this summer. But in seven days that’s going to change! Now I just hope that I can keep this level of energy and motivation and look alive while doing it. =)