Couple of Nice BizTalk Server 2006 Development Features

I'm told that I am easily amused, but these two little BizTalk development nuggets that I recently discovered made me giddy.

First of all, if you're like me, without fail you repeatedly double-click a functoid on a map and expect something to happen. But lo, you are disappointed time and time again. In BizTalk Server 2006, your cries were answered, and a double-click on a functoid opens up the input parameters dialog. Further, if you right click a functoid, now you get a more robust context menu that lets you fire up additional panes (such as the script functoid's script window). And the people rejoiced.

The next finding, although logical in hindsight, is great nonetheless. Let's say you use the fancy new Flat File Wizard to read a flat file and generate a schema. Well, sometimes when you're done you realize you forgot to blow out an additional subset that is delimited by yet another token. Well, the first time that happened to me, I blew away the schema and started over again. That might work for small schemas, but for the big daddies, having to throw out all the work of the Wizard and start over could cause hysterical blindness. So, I recently saw that if you click on a record level node in a flat file schema, the context menu contains an item that re-spawns the Flat File Wizard and lets you just work on a specific sub-node. Right now you should be engaging in a little golf-clapping.