Taking my mouthwash

About four years ago I got my first glimpse of BizTalk.  When I first saw it, I could see lots of possibilities and real potential if this tool was implemented and used properly.

Roughly three years ago I began working in an environment which had a BizTalk solution built.  Now, this solution relies heavily on several web sites which use HTTP post methods to do extra transformations of the messages to strings and from strings to XML.  Not the best solution, in my opinion, but it works.

Well, to say it simply, this has always left a bad taste in my mouth for BizTalk.  We have had issues with the server configurations, keeping the Health & Activity Tracker working, heck even SQL Server fails on us at times.  Basically, the BizTalk solution is not fun to work with.

But recently we have begun to work with BizTalk 2006 and experiment with ways to make an asynchronous messaging platform work for us.  I have only been working with this for a few days and I can already see reasons to enjoy BizTalk again.  So, yeah, I'm taking my mouthwash.

The past few days of discovery have really proven to me that the current implementation, which uses BizTalk for sub-second responses, is not a good long-term solution.  We really need to look at other solutions to continue to provide these services.

But the good news is I am beginning to enjoy working with BizTalk again.