Guidance Explorer

I stumbled upon a very useful tool - Guidance Explorer . If you're into design patterns and best practices, take a look at this (free) tool, its well worth it.

XML Serialization

I've been having to do some custom serialization in BizTalk and wanted to share some lessons learnt:

The System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer class does the serializing and deserializing of class objects. There are some constraints that the class must observe:
1) Only public properties will be serialized, private ones are ignored totally
2) The class must be public too and it needs a parameterless constructor

Serialization example:

MyClass myClass = new MyClass();
FileStream myFileStream = new FileStream(@"C:\output.xml", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Write);

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyClass));
serializer.Serialize(myFileStream, myClass);

If you have a schema for your xml data, use the xsd utility to generate the class:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\xsd MySchema.xsd /classes

I'll comment more about using the IXmlSerializable interface in the future (note that the ReadXml method needs to rehydrate inner objects), but for now thats all.

BizTalk Error

I have come across yet another error in BizTalk, I'll be looking into this one and posting a solution as soon as I find it:

Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.XlangSoapException: An error occurred while processing the message, refer to the details section for more information
Message ID: {AD19FF31-B1EB-45C2-84C8-717C9AA55E4F}
Instance ID: {6AFEEE47-42DC-4EC7-B4BB-7E674597F5C6}
Error Description: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

at Microsoft.BizTalk.XLANGs.BTXEngine.BTXPortBase.VerifyTransport(Envelope env, Int32 operationId, Context ctx)
at Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.Subscription.Receive(Segment s, Context ctx, Envelope& env, Boolean topOnly)
at Microsoft.XLANGs.Core.PortBase.GetMessageId(Subscription subscription, Segment currentSegment, Context cxt, Envelope& env, CachedObject location)