We've covered a lot of ground so far, but there is much more to mapping in BizTalk Services besides the other 27 operations we've not used here. There are two other groups of operations that deserve some discussion.

The first of these is the Get Context Property mapping operation. This provides an often-asked-for feature in BizTalk Server—the ability to retrieve properties from the message context and include them in a map. The way this works is by configuring it, specifying the property name to retrieve it, and then connecting it to a target node; no input nodes are required. We haven't covered context properties in detail yet, but for now, remember that they are a set of name/value pairs that hold contextual information about the current message flow; for example, the transport details (for example, a filename) of the message received, or even properties of the message itself that have been extracted. If you're wondering how you can test this from within Visual Studio as...