There’s a wealth of information in the Biztalk
2004 SDK and I keep learning new things every day from the samples in there. It’s
well worth spending some quality team looking through the code there especially if
you’re serious about developing a good knowledge of BizTalk and its internals. And
don’t just read the docs, have a look at the code and find out why things are implemented
the way they are.
An interesting example is the CustomPartyResolution
sample. The online help gives details on how to run the sample, but there’s so much
more under the covers. For instance, the pipeline component implements a custom stream
handler but doesn’t explain why it does this. Turns out that the pipeline component
could be invoked before the input stream has completed and at this point the context
properties for the message haven’t been populated. So the sample has a custom stream
handler which fires a CallBack to the actual code once the input stream has finished.
My thanks go out to Wayne
Clark at Microsoft for explaining this to me, but as you so, tons of valuable
information lie buried in the SDK.
Make sure you get the SDK
refresh which contains the latest samples.