I'm a really big fan of BAM and I use it in basically every solution I create. Even if it is just for support use the ability to see into running business processes is vital. As much as I love BAM I would say that there is still a lack of good information out there about it. Here is one of my favorite details. Which schema you tie your BAM to depends on if you're binding to a Send or Receive port.

I always build my solutions with a consistent Visual Studio Solution Structure that has always worked well for me. Binding BAM to my internal (or canonical) schemas always made sense and I did it on Receive ports religiously. As I got further into BAM and pushed into more complex Continuations and features that were simply were not available in 2004 I discovered something interesting. I could never make my Send ports track (i.e. correctly) to my canonical schema.

It turns out that this is by design. BAM tracks at different points in the Pipeline / Port processing depending upon if a port is a send or receive port (or at least this is what I have gathered on my own). I was told of this during support research on My First BizTalk Bug. I really didn't like this, but some of it does make sense. Ultimately what this means is that if you want to track receipt and sending of business data in BAM your Tracking Profile must bind to the external schema (i.e. the post map result) of the send port.

If this weren't enough, however, you must also track the external schema on the response of a Solicit-Response send port (a two-way send port). I found this one just purely through trial and error. I suspect that in the name of consistency the Response from a Request-Response port (two-way receive) probably also needs to track on the internal schema.