One limitation of BizTalk 2004 is that it has no inbuilt way to poll an email server for incoming messages. However it does have an open framework for developing custom adapters in order to accomplish this. Bill Chesnut (BizTalk Bill) has done a great job of writing just such an adapter. He has reworked some POP3 open source code from codeproject.com and incorporated it into the adapter framework to produce quite a flexible adapter. You can configure it to scan either the body of an email or an attachment for messages to pass into BizTalk. Below is a screenshot of the Receive Location dialog box where you can configure the POP3 parameters. You can see that it is quite straightforward.
Full documentation and source code come with the adapter when you download it from GotDotNet.
At first, I ended up with errors in Event Viewer when I configured it to work with my Bigpond email account. I emailed Bill from the contact information in the documentation and he supplied me with a test harness application in order to troubleshoot the error. He sent me a fix that same day which is included in the latest download. Now it works great.
It definitely fills a need that many BizTalk developers were looking for. Thanks Bill.
posted on Tuesday, November 09, 2004 9:22 PM