Learned A Little on .Net Namespaces

I’m back in the action again working on a large BizTalk Healthcare project after some time off.

This is the first time I’ve worked with HIPAA transactions like 270, 271, and others and so far I have learned a lot.

Like other projects I have worked on in the past, one of the first things I do is create projects and namespaces for the new code we have to build. This is usually something you did not have to put much thought into.  But with transactions like 270 I went to make a namespace like BizTalk.270.  This is all great until you deploy your code.  Visual Studios will add an “_” into the namespace like BizTalk._270 and never tells you it did this.  This is because .net namespaces cannot start with a number.  This extends to anything following the “.” In the namespace as well.

Then, I figured I would try BizTalk.X12-270.  But nope, hyphens are not allowed in namespaces as well.

I ended up at BizTalk.X12_270 but in the meantime I had to update all the projects twice to end up there.  Next time, I will test things out on one project before I go and update 50 projects with a specific namespace format.