Visual Studio 2013 enables Build and Deploy after Migration

Just to know when you migrate from VS2010 to VS2012: The configuration manager can change an inactive project so that it would be build and deployed. So just check the configuration manager after migrating.

EDIOverride Properties have been renamed

Short info: When migrating from BizTalk 2010 to BizTalk 2013, you have to adapt the EDIOverride properties. For example, the property Unb21 is now called UNB2_1.
The EDIOverride properties are stored in Microsoft.BizTalk.Edi.BaseArtifacts.dll.

Error "There was an authentication failure"

Whenever our POP3 Receive Location read a signed mail, it throwed the following exception and suspended the instance:

A message received by adapter "POP3" on receive location "yyy" with URI "POP3://yyy#yyy\yyy" is suspended.
Error details: There was an authentication failure. "The status of the certificate authority that issued the certificate used to sign the message is unknown.".

The reason behind was, that the certificate was found, but the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) from the Internet could not be opened, because the server had no Internet access. Since the CRL is saved in public available CRL files, we only had to open the firewall for these types of files, and BizTalk could accept the mails.

BatchComplete-Error in Biztalk Base Adapter

After migrating from Biztalk 2006 to Biztalk 2010, our custom adapters threw new errors when a message suspended:

One from MS CoreAdapter

Batch.BatchComplete hrStatus:c000010x00c00001: BTS_S_EPM_MESSAGE_SUSPENDED (Transport Proxy)

... the other one in our customer Adapter:

[26] ERROR [(null)] BIZTALK_StammdatenTransfers_XferDBAdapter_StammdatenTransfer - Beim Versenden des Batches [BatchInfo(00d6d71f), Batch(00e70a8e)]trat ein Problem auf:

12582913-0x00c00001: BTS_S_EPM_MESSAGE_SUSPENDED (Transport Proxy)

The reason was a missing bugfix that Microsoft introduced in BTS2010 into the BaseAdapter. If you get the new version (however, with the same version number 1.0.2) from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010\SDK\Samples\AdaptersDevelopment\BaseAdapter\v1.0.2, the problem should be fixed.

BizTalk 2010 Tracking error: Receive and Send Ports do not track

We've just run into the problem that our receive and send ports did not track anything, although we've checked all tracking options and all needed database jobs were running. After analysing the problem for a while, we found out that orchestrations and custom pipelines track, but not the Biztalk system pipelines XmlTransmit, XmlReceive and PassThru pipeline.

With the help of the Biztalk support team, we found that somehow the database was screwed up - while the UI showed us all tracking checks enabled, the exported binding file showed only PipelineEvents as TrackingOption, while ServiceStartEnd and MessageSendReceive were missing.

The actual error was in table TraceTrackingInfo where imgData had the value 0x10000000 instead of 0x13000000. You can change it with SQL but keep in mind that the column is in hexadecimal format. Manipulate the table hence like this (after making a backup):

begin transaction
update BizTalkMgmtDb.dbo.StaticTrackingInfo set imgData = 0x13000000 where strServiceName in (
'Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLTransmit',
'Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive',
'Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.PassThruTransmit',
'Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.PassThruReceive')
--commit

Addition 24.10.2012: Two actions had changed the pipeline:

First, the wrong field value had been inserted by another, self-written script during a deplyoment step, so this is not a Biztalk error.

Second, when importing a binding file where TransmitPipeline had only the TrackingOption="PipelineEvents", this pipeline was modified to the wrong value.

If you now run into the same problem, you can check (and correct) imgData; then, you should also check which routine in your system might have modified imgData before.

Reading current UNB Reference numbers from Biztalk

While migrating EDIFACT partners from Biztalk 2006 to 2010, we had to read the current UNB Reference numbers from the Biztalk 2006 database. They are stored in the BiztalkMsgBoxDb database in table EdiSequenceNumbers. Using the column PartyId, one can link the numbers to the EDI party information from database BiztalkMgmtDb, table EdiPartnerEdifactInterchange. BTW, beginning from Biztalk 2009, you can directly set the UNB Reference number before sending the EDIFACT XML to the EDI Send Pipeline, hence it might be useful to create the number by oneself.

Parse XML with XmlReader (closing empty elements correctly)

If you want to parse an XML document with the XmlReader, it might help to use this XmlReader example from MSDN. However, there's one thing missing: If you parse an XML with empty elements, such as:
<example1 />
<example2>bla</example2>

the example doesn't set the closing tags write, but like this:
<example1>
 <example2>bla</example2>
</example1>

In order to omit this problem, you have to write the end elements in case that the reader parses an empty element:
case XmlNodeType.Element:
writer.WriteStartElement(reader.Name);
writer.WriteAttributes(reader, true);
if (reader.IsEmptyElement)
 writer.WriteEndElement();
break;

VS/BTS Error "The system cannot find the file specified"

If you receive the error message "The system cannot find the file specified." with the exception code 80070002 while adding a disassembling schema in Visual Studio/BizTalk, it is because VS does not find the assembly from the referenced project with the schema. Just build the referenced project, and then you should be able to add the schema.

Error details: The Messaging Engine encountered an error during the processing of one or more inbound messages.

If you have created a flatfile schema, you might run into the following error:

A message received by adapter "FILE" on receive location "..." with URI "D:\dev\TestFlatfileDis\filedrop\*Copy.txt" is suspended.
Error details: The Messaging Engine encountered an error during the processing of one or more inbound messages.

In this case, it might be that your test file is running into an error while reading the lines:

Reason: Unexpected data found while looking for:
'\r\n'
The current definition being parsed is Root. The stream offset where the error occured is 13. The line number where the error occured is 3. The column where the error occured is 2.

To solve this, check that all the lines go until a certain column. If you can't ensure this, you could define the fields (at the end of the line) with MinOccurs=0, so that it can be omitted.

XML-Error Message "content is not allowed in prolog"

When we created a BizTalk Mapping in VS2008, the compiler returned the error "line 1 colum 1 content is not allowed in prolog". Since the compiler told us that the error was detected in the very beginning (line 1 column 1), we needed a bit of time to see that actually the error was inside the document, where we had filled an element with a value although this shouldn't contain one.
So, if you get the same error message, check which fields you filled and if one of these shouldn't be filled.