BizTalk Toolbox: BizTalk MessageViewer HAT Plugin

As a BizTalk developer I have come to rely rather heavily on a variety of tools to assist with various aspects of developing, deploying, documenting and testing BizTalk solutions.  The latest addition to this toolbox is the BizTalk MessageViewer HAT Plugin, referred to me by a colleague, Willem Fourie.

This little utility is a nice time-saver, allowing you to view tracked messages from within BizTalk's Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) tool.  Traditionally, if you wanted to see a tracked message from within HAT you would need to save the message to disk, and then load the message from disk.  Your other option for viewing messages is to use the BizTalk Group Hub, but that is geared towards displaying messages that are suspended, and does not by default display messages that have been successfully processed.  This new plug-in, available at https://www.codeplex.com/btsviewerhatplugin, hides this from you and presents you with a functional UI in which to view the message(s) selected.

The tool is very new - only having been released in its version on the 23rd of May - so there are few kinks to still work out of it, but it is nevertheless a great time saving tool, and one I will certainly be monitoring for further development, and using on a frequent basis.

I will endeavour to add more information on the tools that I use over the next few posts.  What are the tools you are using?