Brian H. Prince

A book from Apress just came out called Pro BizTalk 2006 by George Dunphy and Ahmed Metwally. I don't know them, but I know Marty , who wrote the forward This is not a book review. I don't do that. I don't have the patience to think deep enough about a book, to reflect on it, and comment on it with the depth a potential would expect. Jim does a great job doing that, so I will leave it to him. But, I do categorize books on a simple continuum, and it goes something like this: 0 - what? you killed a tree for this? 1 - well thanks for the effort, I guess I wasn't the right audience 2 - learned a lot, will keep for reference reasons, and loan it generously 3 - my eyes are so wide open now they hurt in full sunlight 4 - I will make whoever I can read this, even if it is against their will. I will buy them a copy and ship it to them without telling them. This book is squarely in category four, if you are a BizTalk developer/architect. I am continually amazed at the quality of...

In a lot of BizTalk Server environments, performance is critical. It is not uncommon to hear for a client that they need to be able to process a specific level of transactions in a certain time window. Unfortunately, it is usually followed by the question: "So, how much hardware do I need?" There isn't anyway to answer that question because there are too many unknowns. How big are the messages? How complex are the pipelines and maps? What about the orchestrations, if any? What other systems or adapters will be involved? There are several strategies for finding out how much hardware you need. The first is a 'grow as you can' model. You deploy your system on a good foundation. A good SQL Server and a good single or pair of BizTalk servers. Once in production, slowly increase the traffic or consumers of the business process. As limits are reached, add more servers to the BizTalk group. This is a very organic model, and allows you to add only what you need. This mo...

It has been almost a year since a bunch of us had met at a Japanese restaurant last winter to discuss a new type of event. We had all delivered one day conferences before, and had success. But we wanted more, and we thought attendees did as well. We wanted something that spoke to technology a little further up the though chain. Instead of a whole day on how to do .NET, we wanted sessions on topics that affect all developers. Better architecture. Better development practices. Better guidance. We also wanted to learn more about our own platforms by learning about other platforms. To that end, we have formed an Ohio Non Profit organization whose goal is to put on technical education conferences. The first conference will be CodeMash Conference 2007. It will be held at the Kalahari, in Sandusky, Ohio on January 18th and 19th, 2007. We have arranged some major sponsors, and even more importantly, some GREAT speakers. Great Speakers? YES! Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, and Scott Guthrie! Chec...

  This post was going to be a daily post about the SOA conference, as it was happening. Unfortunately, I had been on the road for weeks during that period, and then my stay at the conference was cut short for personal reasons. Here are some of my notes, and I will probably blog about some the topics in more depth as time permits.   The annual SOA conference at MS has just kicked off. We are expecting some major announcements pertaining the future of the BizTalk platform. I have some ideas about what they will say, but I will hold out for the keynotes to see for sure. A lot of well known speakers will be here this week, and I look forward to talking about SOA and what advances there are in helping driving business value. David Chappell is giving the first keynote right now. He defines some fundamental aspects of SOA (which is universally difficult to put a good definition on) as: - Standardize on SO communication protocol (SOAP is what made this 20 years long overnig...