Brian H. Prince

Many of you know I have spent a good portion of my past five years working on a lot of BizTalk related projects. What does BizTalk do? Everything of course! :) If you are doing SOA, or an ESB, integration, edi, or RFID, this is the tool for you. I missed this news last month because I was so heads down on CodeMash. We just released the beta of BizTalk Server 2009. We also release the RFID Mobile and RFID Standards pack. The first thing any BizTalk’er would want in the new version is support for the latest platform versions. Even in BizTalk 2006 R2 you had to use VS2005. With BizTalk 2009 you can use Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. The new version also has extended support for Oracle e-business suite, IBM CICS, IMS, DB2, and WebSphere MQ. There is new support for UDDI v3.0, which is important in service registry scenarios. You can grab the beta over here . An update to the ESB Toolkit is available...

The SOA & Business Process Conference 2009 is put on by Microsoft, and is held on campus in Redmond. I have been to it many times as a partner and customer, and it is one of my favorite events. The event always gives you great access, directly, to the teams building our strategies and products around SOA and BPM. This is a great chance to learn a great deal, and provide feedback on our roadmap. The conference is also loaded with thought leaders, and leading companies in the SOA/BPM space. The event has grown so large over the years, that in order to keep it on campus, they had to break it into two parts. The first part is for partners in the SOA/BPM space, and runs January 26-27, 2009, and will cost $599. The second part will be for customers, and runs January 28-30, 2009, and will cost $599 if you register before December 1st, 2008. There is also a great reception held on the evening of January 27th for all of the incoming customer attendees. The theme for this year is “Re...

The launch event in Columbus was yesterday. I think it went very well. I was excited to see the room packed, and we had a lot of great conversations around BTS, SOA, and WCF. Several people asked for the decks. I believe MS will be sending them out to the attendees, but I will post them here (at least the ones I used) here as well. And congratulations to William for winning the Xbox 360 Halo 3 Special Edition! 

No, I am not taking a trip to here , here , or here . Oslo is the codeword (gosh, I love code words for products. I still think of VS2005 as Whidbey.) for the next generation of SOA enabling products and technologies from Microsoft. Oslo was recently announced at the SOA conference in Seattle, WA this week. Oslo is a very small word for something so big. I have been fortunate to be involved in some groups that get to provide feedback and input into the shaping of this strategy. And it has been killing me not being able to even talk a little bit about it. I have to be careful and only talk about what MS has been public about. Parts of Oslo are the next versions of BizTalk, WCF, WF, Visual Studio, and a whole raft of other technologies that CSD are trying to bring into alignment. The MS platform provides a bunch of great techs today to do SOA, and build ESBs. The current problem is that the toolset is rich, but not well aligned. These investments will make these solutions that much e...

If you are running 2004 or 2006, then you need to apply this patch to deal with the upcoming time change as a result of the recent legislation. http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2007/10/04/required-biztalk-patches-for-daylight-savings-time.aspx

I have been invited to speak at the November meeting of the local chapter of the local chapter of the Association For Computing Machinery ( oldwww.acm.org/chapters/cocacm/) .  The ACM's home page is www.acm.org . I will be doing a lap around MS BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), how to pick each tool for your needs, and to discuss their common uses. I hope to see you there!

This is another great book from Wrox. They provided the book free to me in exchange for a (hopefully unbiased) review through the MVP program. The title is " Professional BizTalk Server 2006 ", and was written by Darren Jefford , Kevin B. Smith , Ewan Fairweather . You might recognize Kevin's name as the creator of BizUnit. I have never met any of the authors, but they have great reputations in our niche, and, based on the contents of this book, really know what they are talking about. Let me start by saying there are many good books on BizTalk on the market now. I am really pleasantly surprised by this, as BTS 2004 only had a few books available. This books suffers from a confusing title. If you scroll back in history, Apress has a book on BTS called " Pro BizTalk 2006 ", which is very similar to this book's title. I think these two books actually make a good pair. The Apress book is great for people who just went to training, and are diving in, and are ...

I have been super busy this week (getting CodeMash.org registration live), and didn't have time to let people know that R2 has finally been released. It should be available on MSDN now as well. Go download the bits, and enjoy all of the new goodness. EDI and RFID rock. But for us, WCF is the biggest new feature I am excited about.

John Brockmeyer is the primary author of a new BizTalk performance white paper titled " BizTalk Server Database Optimization ". I have been waiting for this to come out for months now ever since he presented his draft material to us at the annual Virtual TS summit in San Diego. This paper goes into great detail as to what settings and changes can affect the performance of your BTS system. He details each step, links to relevant background information, and even scores each with a difficulty level. I feel the title is misleading, it covers far more than just tuning the SQL database. I consider this mandatory reading for anyone managing or developing any significant BTS application. It is worth your time to read. Go now, read it before you focus shift to something less worthy.

We have been waiting anxiously for R2 to come out. There are some great features included; features that we could use today on several projects. Most clients are reluctant to start development on the beta, even if the go-live date of the project is after the expected GA date of R2. We have been waiting to find out some final details on those features, as well as a release date, pricing, and edition information. At the Worldwide Partner Conference 2007, MS announced these details to the public, but I haven't seen them discussed anywhere. I checked with the product group, and they said it would be ok for me to write about what was announced. We, and other people, are looking for this information so they can plan for and manage their projects and environments for how R2 might impact them. First, the features: Whole new, revamped EDI stack with AS2 in the box RFID platform BizTalk Adapter Framework 2 Platform alignment (WCF adapters, etc.) This is great news. I have been wai...

Thanks to Keith Bauer and all of the other smart MS folks who put together the BizTalk resources list. Sometimes it can be overwhelming when you start to dig into the available material. Web casts, articles, books, v-labs, hands on labs, oh my! This is a special post just for my Nashville BizTalk class. -bhp BizTalk Server - Links and Resources Primary Websites BizTalk Product Website BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. This includes powerful, familiar tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage those processes. Everything you need for easy installation is included—integrated management tools, support for Web services, and a new business activity monitoring (BAM) portal. In addition, BizTalk Server 2006 includes 23 application and technology adapters in the box for connecting to legacy systems (mainframe and mid-range) and line-of-business applications (SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and JD Edwards...

Barnes and Noble has setup a special page for BizTalk books where Microsoft customers can get a 25% discount. Just another reason I prefer B&N over Amazon. http://btob.barnesandnoble.com/index.asp?r=1&btob=Y

Alexei is a long time friend of mine. We also happen to be co-workers. He is an egineer's engineer. Around our office, when referring to the skill set of a candidate for an opening, we use the term 'Alexei level' as a measuring stick. He is also one of the smartest guys I know. He takes every challenge head on, and beats it soundly, or nags me to death until he does. So I threw down the gauntlet. Alexei, I said, share some of that there know how. Alexei , welcome to the blogosphere (gosh I hate that term.)

Told you I had a lot of free time today. Dave Donaldson just published his NHibernateRepository assembly. Go read about it. I normally don't like 'link to something else' posts, but this is really cool, and I know we will get some great use out of it, since we use NHibernate quite often on our projects. Since I am linking to other posts, check out Jeff's post on 'Please advise...' . He and I share the same derision for this 'line'. - bhp

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...

  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...