Guerilla BizTalk

I’m sitting in the very first ever Guerilla BizTalk Server 2006 class. It’s pretty exciting how far BizTalk Server has come since I’ve been on the team. There are over 60 people in the class and the new version likely ships in another 6 or 8 months. The level of interest in what we’re doing with BizTalk Server is extremely gratifying.

Are you wondering where this blog post is going? I haven’t blogged anything is so long I should have lots to say right. Well sure, but the real reason I’m blogging now is because Jon has been bugging me to do it more often. I know it’s only a matter of time before he busts on me in front of class. This is really just a preemptive blog entry.

I do have an excuse for going dark for so long (but it’s like any excuse, i.e. 50% truth and 50% BS). A week and a half ago the BizTalk product group hosted the Business Process, Integration and Workflow Conference on campus. I was one of the owners of that project. The other owner was Burley Kawasaki on my team. Burley is a great guy to work with for sure but his name is so cool. Is that the best name you’ve heard all day or what ;^).

In any case, the conference brought in over 500 attendees from over 200 distinct organizations representing 38 countries from all over the world. It was a lot of work to plan and execute but the show itself was a blast. Hanging out with that many people who are at the forefront of all things BizTalk is about the best time I can imagine.

One of the things that came out of the conference is that people want to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and BizTalk Server 2006 together. Think about the possibilities. WF really does change the landscape for workflow enabled applications. It is great for building single point services which enable scenarios such as workflow within line of business applications, user interface page-flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite workflow for service oriented applications, business rule driven workflow and workflow for systems management. When you tie these services together with WCF some truly amazing possibilities for new applications emerge. Further more by throwing BizTalk into the mix you get a massively scaleable deployment architecture, end-to-end tracking and an instrumentation framework for basically free (among lot’s of other things).

Well another guy on the team, Paul Andrew, and I are looking at building a sample/demo and some technical guidance on how to do exactly these things. He and I own  a series of sessions at the upcoming VS Live conference in San Francisco. Much of that content will be debut there.

So I’ll try to make Jon happy by blogging more often and keep you folks up to date on the convergence of all of these cool new technologies and products right here in this space.