BizTalk 2004 is starting to heat up...!

Just received the Release Candidate on BizTalk 2004 (BTSEvalRC - 74367-000-0000007-05479). It sure has been tidied up. Not only that, but there seems to be generally more chatter on the forums and with a lot more material popping up.

Anyway this entry will be a placeholder of references (heres a few for starters):-

• BizTalk PowerToys from luke nyswonger.
  
• El Grego ( i don't know his name) has a sample which shows how to use the Enterprise Instrument Framework to generate an application event (in this case a suspended message caused by a send port retry failure). Although BizTalk generates a plethora of WMI events that can be picked up by MOM (and NetIQ soon).
  
• Martijn Hoogendoorn has a Suspended Queue Listener Windows Service which basically listens out for the WMI event and allows you to then do what you want with it... It works in real-time and batch mode as well... Get it here.
  
• Brian Loesgens has some cool code that implements service windows for send/receive locations. Get it here.
  
• Stephan Bouillon has a real cool component that replaces the standard XML validator used in the BizTalk default pipeline. Rather than the standard behaviour of suspending the message it sends an error to the messagebox, this allows you to have a error handling orchestration that can subsribe to these messages... This greatly improves the end-to-end management of BizTalk, product team why did you not think about this!!?!
  
• Another bright chap Stephen Thomas has some interesting pieces on sequential convoying, etc...
  
• Jeff Lynch is doing some pretty harcore mapping examples, especially around conditional outputs for linenumbers.
  
• Giles Zunino has a good example of how you can archive any messages as they are passing through the BizTalk pipeline. This i see as a standard service that ought to be provided by BizTalk, and perhaps through HAT you can achieve this. However companies may have compliance issues which deem the need for a more legally watertight solution. Anyhow something that i had been thinking about also.
  
• The Core Engineering team from the Biztalk product team are now getting on the case, this really does raise the quality of information coming out. No other vendor can match this openness. Well done Kevin B Smith and Lou Graber
  
• Jan Thielens Blog has some good best practices on BizTalk 2004, particularly around foundation components like error logging, exceptionstions, and XML dis-assembly (since the product documentation only covers CSV)
• Mike Holdorf's been keeping it real with some pains and best practices on BizTalk.
  
• Charles Young from Solidsoft has some interesting articles on BizTalk Orchestrations and Transactions.
  
• Carlo Poli has is having some fun with versioning BizTalk assemblies over here...
  
• A new book on BizTalk 2004 development on Amazon.
  
• Another Christoph has some development learnings on using BizTalk orchestrations.
  
• The Middleware company has released a .NET community for serverside, enterprise specialists, its called strangely enough, theServerside.NET!!
  
• Some early ideas on naming standards for BizTalk orchestrations.
  
• Scott Woodgate who is the programme manager of the BizTalk Server / Jupiter Programme.
  
• An interesting presentation from Claesen Christof on BizTalk 2004 and how it can be used as a Enterprise Service Bus. And another on a simple and easy BizTalk 2004 overview.
  
• Darren Jefford is having some fun with MSMQT and MSI Exception handling at his blog over here.. way to go!
  
• The gotdotnet community has a number of code samples and its own special workspace for BizTalk.
  
• Mike Woods has his own msn workspace which include the hands on labs that was available at TechEd and PDC.
  
• You can find many of the presentations and videos from the PDC 2003 here . (its only here for 6 months so hurry!)
  
• You can find many of the presentations and videos from the various TechEds 2003 here.
  
• Benjamin Mitchell has some interesting things to say regarding Indigo, BizTalk and Yukon (Service broker). More on his comments later.
  
• Microsoft's BizTalk 2004 beta newsgroup.
  
• Microsofts BizTalk public newgroup on all things BizTalk.
  
  More to come soon...