BizTalk is Dead? Long Live BizTalk!

By John Callaway

The BizTalk Server team blog sneaked out an announcement yesterday that you might have missed. I caught it due to an RSS feed. BizTalk Server 2010 R2 is coming. Now the question is when, and a better question will they change the name, as they should to BizTalk 2011?

We have a while to wait, no firm dates yet, but since it adds support for Windows Server 8 and SQL Server 2010 (codename Denali) which don’t have announced release dates yet either, that isn’t too much of a surprise. They are saying about six months after those products release. Support for Visual Studio 11 was also part of the announcement.

It doesn’t sound at all earth shattering, more just a bit of a jiggle. It may calm some of the fears as they are frequently bandied about from the title of the article, that BizTalk is a dying breed. Rest assured that QuickLearn will be on the forefront of training for this new product as soon as a beta is available.

In addition to support for the new platforms another point of interest is a change to licensing making it possible to provide BizTalk as a hosted service , and to transfer a license to a hosting provider. This is obviously a step in moving BizTalk into the cloud, a change that has long been planned. We’ll have to see what that means as to whether Microsoft will be a possible provider themselves (a la Office 365 and SharePoint online).

That’s about it for what’s new unless you are interested in IBM host integration there are some adapter improvements that way. For the whole article check out the BizTalk Team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2011/12/08/biztalk-server-2010-r2.aspx

Until next time, see you in the funny papers.

New BizTalk 2010 Training from QuickLearn

By Rob Callaway

Last year was a busy teaching year for me. I taught 35 BizTalk training courses to over 385 BizTalk developers and admins around the world. I received lots of great feedback from our students on ways to improve on our BizTalk Server training. This has resulted in complete rewrites of our BizTalk 2010 Developer Immersion and BizTalk 2010 Developer Deep Dive to make our BizTalk Server 2010 courses even better than ever. Here is a summary of what’s new in these two classes…

BizTalk 2010 Developer Immersion

This class is still intended for students who are new to developing BizTalk Server solutions. However, we have re-written all of the hands-labs to provide a less-traditional end-to-end scenario that I think students will really enjoy working with. We’ve also abandoned the use of step-by-step instructions in later labs. Essentially, we show students how to perform a task one time and then make the assumption that they will be able to repeat the process on their own as they progress through the course. This learning style changes the dynamic of the labs and requires students to apply what they have learned instead of just following written instructions. This makes the lab experience more challenging and much more rewarding.

Also, we have added optional challenge labs for students who want to dive deeper into more advanced BizTalk development topics during open lab time or by remoting into our lab environment after hours. For example, we have challenge labs for students who want to learn about EDI integration, how to process HIPAA healthcare documents, how to write application deployment scripts, and many more. We have also added new modules that cover tracking and troubleshooting of BizTalk run-time errors and BizTalk project planning and management.

BizTalk 2010 Developer Deep Dive

In the past we have had some problems with the leveling for the Deep Dive class. We kept getting too many students with little or no experience with BizTalk, who were not prepared for an advanced BizTalk course. As a result, students were often left behind or the instructor had to water down the training to meet their needs.

After much deliberation we finally decided that it was time to make the Deep Dive class exactly what it should be, very advanced! In this class we absolutely hit the ground running. There’s no time for “introduction to…” conversations. We assume that students already know everything that is taught in the BizTalk Immersion class and crank the dial to 11 with over 30 hands-on labs! We cover all the fun things in BizTalk like: custom components (pipeline and functoids), loosely-coupled orchestration patterns (call/start orchestration shapes, direct-bound ports), convoys, calling pipelines in orchestrations, failed message routing, and more. In fact, this is probably the most fun I’ve ever had while teaching a BizTalk class.

Whether you are new-to-product or a seasoned BizTalk developer, we have the best training to fit your needs. Check out 2011 training calendar for upcoming classes.

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