by Thomas | Dec 1, 2006 | BizTalk
BizTalk Server has long been one of the most powerful — and unwieldy — tools in Microsoft’s server arsenal. Sadly, BizTalk 2006 is what BizTalk 2004 should have been, and one wonders why it took so long to arrive. Frankly, I’m not sure that Microsoft really knows what to do with BizTalk. I believe that the product is misunderstood even within Microsoft itself, and I do not think the marketing and sales teams really know how to market and sell it. When you consider the number of years that BizTalk has existed (six), it has a very small number of customers.
Developers naturally want to write custom code, so it’s not easy to convince them of BizTalk’s benefits. It certainly doesn’t help when Windows Workflow (WF) comes along with a big marketing bang and further distracts the developer community. Now you’ve got developers looking at the WF design surface and thinking that it looks just like BizTalk’s, so it must be the same, and it must be better because it’s newer. True or not, this is the kind of problem that Microsoft has created for itself.
I believe that Microsoft needs a different approach to selling BizTalk. First of all, the product group needs to get a grip on the product’s future direction, and then educate — repeatedly! — Microsoft’s sales teams until they finally understand the product and how to sell it. Second, pushing feature lists is a lost cause. Your average CIO/CTO doesn’t care. Microsoft should be selling BizTalk with specific business scenarios. They could build example solutions that are written in both C# and in BizTalk, and show explicitly how BizTalk reduces code, brings in management and monitoring features, etc. Reducing the barrier to entry is critical. Providing extensive samples and prescriptive guidance for developers would help adoption from the technical side.
Here’s my list of the top three issues in BizTalk 2006 that the product group should address in v.Next:
Inadequate support for medium to large sized messages. In an ideal world all messages would be 0-150KB, but realistically people need to send around metadata plus documents like PDFs, etc. The larger the message size the quicker problems are encountered, from hosts running out of memory and crashing to high CPU utilization to extreme SQL Server stress.
BAM is extremely valuable but still too hard to configure, so it is not used as often as it should be, and that is really a shame. The tools need to be brought together into the Visual Studio IDE or into the Admin Console.
Debugging tools are not even CLOSE to Microsoft standards. Visual Studio is known for an outstanding debugging experience, and BizTalk has a horrible debugging experience. We should be able to open a BizTalk project and directly debug pipelines and orchestrations in the IDE.
What else should the product team improve upon? How could Microsoft better position BizTalk in the market? I’d love to hear your opinions.
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by Thomas | Oct 9, 2006 | BizTalk
Thanks again to everyone who attended my session entitled “Effective Techniques for Handling Large Messages in Service Oriented Solutions” at the Microsoft SOA & BP Conference. The session covered the difficulties of working with large messages in service-oriented environments, then provided general strategies and specific guidance for both BizTalk Server 2006 and ASP.NET Web services.
Here’s the PowerPoint presentation from the session. I’m still debating how to release the Slice/Splice BizTalk pipeline component code. One option is to create a new community project at either CodePlex or GotDotNet. Another option is to use a GPL or similar open-source license. Any ideas? Please let me know what you think.
soa04_abraham.zip
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by Thomas | Oct 6, 2006 | BizTalk, Personal
It’s the last day of the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference and just about time to head for home. I’ve had a great week in Redmond and have had a chance to talk with many other members of the BizTalk community. The conference has more than 700 attendees, and I was surprised to discover that 40% or more were international. QuickLearn has been running some great training classes on BizTalk, WCF, WF and Atlas both before and after the conference.
Thanks to everyone who attended my session on working with large messages in BizTalk and ASP.NET Web services! The session was well attended and, not surprisingly, a lot of people are having these issues. As soon as I get approval from Microsoft, I’ll get a post together with the PowerPoint slides and the pipeline component code.
Overall, the conference was worthwhile, but I would have preferred much more detail in the sessions and greater presence from the MS product developers. Hopefully that will be improved for next year. No real news from the conference other than the limited availability to partners of an ESB guidance package for BizTalk.
Thanks for reading and please stay tuned for the session materials.
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by Thomas | Aug 22, 2006 | BizTalk, Personal
The Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference is coming soon. This is a great 4-day conference held at the Microsoft campus at an awesome price – only $199! Consider that TechEd costs nearly $2,000! Of course you have to pay to get there, but really, this is still a terrific deal.
The conference features four tracks, three technical and one business:
- Service Oriented Architecture (incl. BizTalk 2006, WCF, WF, HIS and more)
- Connected Systems Technology and Products (.NET 3.0 and BizTalk 2006)
- Business Process Management (Office System 2007 and BizTalk 2006 R2)
- Business Value (Why care and what are the opportunities)
The agenda and sessions are still being finalized, so keep checking the conference website for updates.
I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting the following session in the SOA track, so I hope to see you there!
Effective Techniques for Working with Large Messages in a Service-Oriented Architecture
In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), small messages are easy to work with and don’t create extra challenges of their own, but various issues arise when the message size grows to megabytes in size. This session will identify the issues you should consider and then explore specific techniques that you can use to work effectively with large messages in ASP.NET 2.0 Web services and BizTalk Server 2006.
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by Thomas | Jul 24, 2006 | BizTalk, Personal
I’ve been doing my best to procrastinate taking all of these certification exams, so I finally had to just schedule and go, ready or not. So, a week after the 70-536 .NET exam and feeling a bit rusty with BizTalk 2004, I took 74-135, the BizTalk Server 2004 TS exam. Passing is 700, there are 40 questions and you have two hours max.
Fresh hands-on experience definitely helps with this test, as well as a lot of facts and useless knowledge like the command-line parameters to the management tools. Microsoft’s expert test writers seem to believe that one will not have access to the product documentation to simply LOOK UP command-line parameters!
Having not laid a hand on BizTalk (2004) for at least three months, and having procrastinated studying again, I wasn’t looking forward to test day, but I passed and it’s done, so it was worth the trouble.
So how did I prepare (or not, in this case)? I read the first 300 pages of BizTalk 2004 Unleashed in the three evenings prior as a refresher. Beyond that I relied on my brief experience of 6-8 weeks earlier this year developing with BizTalk messaging and orchestrations, and I have done many BizTalk installs with both 2004 and 2006, not to mention debugging other peoples’ BizTalk solutions.
The test manages to hit almost every aspect of BizTalk, including Messaging, Orchestrations, HWS, BAM, BAS, installation and management. That’s why the hands-on experience is so important.
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by Thomas | May 9, 2006 | BizTalk
After many (many) technical and licensing discussions, my current client is moving forward to BizTalk 2006 from BizTalk 2004. We’re excited to finally be able to dump the last SQL Server 2000 and VS.NET 2003 installs and go pure-2.0.
That said, I’ve been busy with BTS 2004 to 2006 upgrades and new installs lately. I found that BizTalk 2006 requires MMC (Microsoft Management Console) 3.0 — but the new and improved BTS installer doesn’t appear to check for it, nor does it install it if you don’t have it! After installing 2006, I tried to open some of the BizTalk MMC snap-ins and was informed that I didn’t have MMC 3.0. Hmm… so much for the dependency checker and automatic download and install of “all” of the software prerequisites. It’s still better than 2004, but how could they miss this??
Save yourself a few minutes and just install MMC 3.0 beforehand. There are different installers for each OS variant, so you can search Microsoft Downloads for “MMC 3.0” to find what you need. This search link might get you there quicker.
[5/18/06 Update] – Evidentally the Enterprise SSO Admin snap-in is the only one that requires MMC 3.0, so you can get away with 2.0 for most of your tasks. However, I’d still advise upgrading to 3.0 to avoid the day when you need that snap-in, the server is in production, you can’t open it, you can’t restart the server, and you throw the keyboard across the room in frustration!
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