So Don

I noticed this little snippet from Don Boxs spoutlet...

Earlier this week, I wanted to install a significant piece of Microsoft software on my machine. The first step of the setup program was not "Install" but rather "Plan." When I selected that step, I was prompted by a ~100K HTML file with all of the prereqs, QFEs and side effects I needed to understand before installing. Given that I have almost no additional time nor room in my brain to process this data, I opted to not install the software and instead dedicate that time to letting the product manager know why "he lost me at hello." Hopefully it will get fixed.

Is it me or is he getting just a little bit irritated with the pre-reqs for installing BizTalk 2004?

Of course this is all just speculation.... :-)

How to learn about BizTalk 2004

People have been dropping me e-mails asking me what is the best way to get into BizTalk and how to learn it.... My advice is to stop reading blogs, and start playing with the code! Only kidding!

To that end the i would highly recommend downloading the newly updated BizTalk 2004 SDK. There are loads of examples that include (orchestrations convering compensation, adapter patterns including the SQL adapter, using the BAM API, invoking the Business Rules engine, Custom Pipelines, building custom Functoids, creating WMI scripts). Its a fantastic resource, so get your head buried in that stuff and you'll be fine...


Also to reduce anyones day-to-day stress, its worth keeping an eye on the Microsooft Knowledge Base for known issues with BizTalk 2004.

Also MSDN has posted some new articles on process integration using BizTalk 2004 and service-oriented integration