Microsoft Techmela was an awesome experience. It was a dream come true! Having spoken in other Microsoft community events like DevCon and Visual Studio Community Launch the next best thing to happen was Tech-Ed / TechMela.

The experience to prepare for TechMela was equally exciting....setting up the BTS 2006 R2 VPC and getting the demo's to work without issues was thrilling. The only thing that I was not too happy was about the fact that my session was immediately after lunch and thus I barely had 50 minutes to finish the whole session. As a result I couldn't cover some gotchas in the session which I have listed here. Please go through the same and do not hesitate to mark your comments / questions to me. I will be happy to answer those.

1. It's possible to upgrade BTS 2006 to R2. The thing to remember is that immediately after an upgrade the EDI and WCF adpaters are not available to use. In that case, re-run the setup for BTS 2006 R2 and in options select "modify". Here you will be able to see an un-checked option for WCf adapter. Check it and install and you should have the WCF adapter available for use.

2. I personally liked to use the Biztalk administration tool to import the bindings and set up the send ports and receive locations. You can also do it from the Biztalk Explorer. Remember that if you manually choose to do it then, you will also have to add a template for the BTM.

3. If you are experimenting on Windows Server 2003, ensure that your application is running under a different app pool and not the defaul app pool. This will help resolving issues like the "Service Unavailable" errors, typically caused due to permission related issues.

For those who would like to download the ppt's, I am uploading those here.

Building Connected Systems on the Microsoft .NET Framework Using the BizTalk Adapter For Windows Communication Foundation.pptx (1.53 mb)

Sarang S. Datye [MSFT]