Difference between Distinguished Fields and Promoted (Promoting) Properties, distinguished fields vs promoted properties

• Distinguished fields are available only within a single orchestration instance, and they are not available to other BizTalk Server objects, such as receive locations, send ports, send port groups, and tracking utilities.
• Distinguished fields can be of any length; promoted properties have a maximum length of 255 characters.
• Distinguished fields have less of a performance impact than promoted properties, as they are not persisted to the MessageBox database. Instead, they are essentially XPath aliases, which simply point to the appropriate XML data field. Additionally, adding the DistinguishedField attribute to a field on a .NET class allows it to be exposed as a distinguished field.
• Distinguished fields are accessed through a reference to the name of the message, the name of the record structure containing the distinguished field (which could include multiple levels of child records), and the name of the distinguished field, with each named item separated by periods: MessageName.RecordName.ChildRecordName.DistinguishedFieldName. Promoted properties, on the other hand, are accessed through a reference to the name of the message, the name of the property schema, and a name of the promoted property, via the following format: MessageName(PropertySchemaName.PromotedPropertyName).