Xmas is here: Pipeline Component Wizard, Promoting Properties, BizTalk Help File Generator. SOA whitepaper, AB's win :)

The AB's were dominant, like I haven't seen in a long-time from a possession perspective, but the slippery pill really caused havock and their finishing was a little poor.  Next up SA at Jade stadium.  I'll be in Australia and NZ for TechEd July 31-August 7th and I'm lamenting the fact that I haven't timed my visit right to pick-up some rugby this year.

Anyways, in other good news - Martijn Hoogendoorn emailed me on Sunday to announce the Pipeline Component Wizard. Martijn took the Adapter Wizard code, added some of his own magic with some neat CodeDOM work and now everyone has a Pipeline Component Wizard complete with property definitions, and a neat little icon picker. If you are building pipeline components, and who isn't, this is going to save you a bunch of time. Unlike the Adapter Wizard you need to compile it so go ahead and open the two projects in VS, compile it then run setup.exe and your wizard is done. 

Update: Go ahead and download the zip file it works fine now.

Adding to that, Johnathan Moons created this whitepaper that explains how to promote properties in pipeline components -which is something you will be commonly using pipeline components for.  With the wizard above you don't need to worry about all the infrastructure and you can just go about

Another cool tool which came from Jason Birth in the UK is the BizTalk Configuration documenter. This serves a similar purpose to the SQL Reporting tool released earlier except that it creates a CHM file of your BizTalk Server configuration. Pretty cool stuff.

Finally there is an interesting whitepaper on SOA to keep you entertained here.  There are only another 40 days left for the BizTalk Server 2004 competition. If you were planning on entering now is the time to get serious and write some code :).

It should be a fun week for me, we will have a bunch of clever people here helping us with future stuff.