One day closer to death...

however - if you like to solve complex Enterprise Integration problems you'll love the design of this product.

I recently switched jobs and one of the first things I'm doing in my new position is learning BizTalk.  I had no prior experience with it but always had a desire to dig in - I've always heard how it was Microsofts best kept secret.  So last week I was at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham for a few days and met with some excellent people who know Biztalk very well.  Their enthusiasm won me over and for the last 3 days I've been reading and watching every whitepaper and webcast I can get my hands on.  I've installed BT2006 on a VPC and run through a couple tutorials and done some virtual labs.  I'm starting to get a handle on where BizTalk fits into solution architecture. 

So, if you love to code and you love Visual Studio you may not like what you see.  Bottom line,  BizTalk does not give the developer a decent environment in which to consume/integrate and debug processing logic.  It's great at forcing an SOA mindset;  creating explicit boundaries, exchanging messages/contracts and not type, etc. (we've all seen the 4 Tenets of SOA slide).  It is great for data transformation tasks and is designed for connecting disparate systems.  But if you need to do more than push and transform data - if you have reams of business rules you need to implement and business users who are not able or willing to maintain them - then you may not be happy with BizTalk's integration with Visual Studio.  The fact that you have to leave Visual Studio to debug an orchestration is not cool.  I really believe that this shortcoming is preventing BizTalk from exploding;  it's still a niche product and it amazes me that Visual Studio support was not a focus for the 2006 release.

The fact is that in most shops developers run the show as far as toolset and implementation... users want quick turnaround and Microsoft has provided the tool of the century to faciliate that.  So until BizTalk joins the RAD party it will always be a struggle for architect types in any shop to get BizTalk adopted.  I've been reading for years that SOA will not take off until toolsets are available to support it.  So Microsoft will soon be shipping WCF and WWF and codehounds will be off to the races.  It's a shame that BizTalk, a product built to faciliate SOA, is not keeping up with the Joneses... whoops I mean Boxes.

I'm sure I'll be posting some more as I continue to learn, it's only been 3 days!, and it may be that I'm missing something... we'll see.