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Finding out the last shape executed in a dehydrated orchestration

You know, I’m really sad that Lee has left the BizTalk team.
‘Cause he’s one of the few that can come up with gems like this:


“As a “parting gift”, I managed
to convince the team to let me add a small enhancement to persistence as long as I
did not push changes to the UI… As part of default dehydration now, the orchestration
engine also persists, in the clear, the name of the shape on which it was blocked”

How is this useful? Well if you don’t know, you can’t have had to debug too many orchestrations…
😉
If you have an orchestration which gets “blocked” i.e. gets dehydrated whilst waiting
for an operation to finish, or a message to arrive (or any one of the things which can
cause a dehydration event to occur
) now you can see the name of the shape at which
dehydration occurred.
Previous to this, you would need to log the names of all the shapes as they executed,
or fire up orchestration debugger to see what the last shape executed was.

So now the race is on to develop a GUI for this…
Pity GotDotNet is no more, as
that would have been the perfect place for it.

Also, note that this applies to BizTalk 2006 R2 only, so unless you’re on the TAP,
you’ll have to wait for the Beta or final release to use this.


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