“Schemas are the soul of BizTalk. They alone create attack and defense, the way they are deployed decides the fate of the game.”
I wanted to record another neat trick from Richard Seroter which saved my bacon recently. I was dealing with a third party who used a web services that did not seem to obey most of the normal rules of the game. No matter how I tried I could not add a reference to it. What made matters worse is that the third party could not tell me what schema they expected. Goggling, I found this article Consuming Web Services in BizTalk Without Web Reference « Richard Seroter’s Architecture Musings. This was exactly what needed, it is a brilliant trick.
I followed Richard’s instructions and created a C# proxy class library simply by submitting the URL of the third party web services to wsdl.exe. The next step was to reference this class in a project, call all the methods from the proxy class and create the schema that the third party was using. The other bonus was that I SOAP port required could be created in a flash by referencing the C# proxy class library in the SOAP port as described in Richard’s article. Weeks of misery evaporated into thin air. Thanks again Richard.
Next time I’ll write about something from my own projects namely “An alternative to the POP3 adapter”.
