Don't use XMLTransmit on SOAP Ports

This one's short and simple: Don't use the XMLTransmit pipeline (or any other pipeline with an XML assembler) on the send side of a SOAP port.

The SOAP adapter receives the message to send in pieces, and knows how to assemble it. The XML assembler (which really only serves a few purposes, none of which are very important, and all of which are easy to achieve via other methods or workarounds) can get confused by these pieces and will fail.

Using the XMLReceive pipeline (or any pipeline with an XML disassembler) on the receive side of a SOAP port is fine, because the adapter has already delivered the full XML message.

Unicode and BizTalk

The BizTalk 2006 disassemblers will choke on UTF16 files that don't have byte order marks. What makes this behavior really strange, especially for users of BizTalk 2002, is that BizTalk 2002 accepted them with or without the marks. It's my understanding that this behavior in 2002 is actually a bug.

If you're trying to figure out why your files aren't jiving with BizTalk, take a look at the encoding and see if that FF FE (or FE FF) is present at the beginning of your files. A custom component in your receive pipeline placed before the disassembler that slips these two bytes in can easily correct the problem.