Udi Dahan   Udi Dahan – The Software Simplist
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BizTalk Blogs and UdiDahan.com, strange bedfellows?

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007.

So, it turns out that Microsoft has quietly launched a new community-style site.

Titled "BizTalk Blogs", I wasn’t quite sure what my blog was doing there. It’s not that I never write about BizTalk – every once in a while I even find something nice to say about it 🙂 My quick post on BizTalk and Performance is one such example. But, let’s face it, a lot of the work I do is to provide BizTalk-like features like routing, transaction-management, and choreography (orchestration) without the actual product.

Apparently, I’m not the only non-BizTalk-only blogger there.

Including such names as Christian Weyer and Michelle Leroux Bustamante , there is a veritable who’s who in the Microsoft Connected Systems ecosystem and, quite frankly, I’m surprised the bouncer let me in the door.

So, this post is for my readers who, like me, have pretty much ignored anything looking like BizTalk for the past few years. Don’t let the name fool you. BizTalk Blogs is a valuable resource even for people who don’t care about BizTalk – and hey, you might even like what you start hearing about the future directions Microsoft is taking it.

But that’s enough of that. We’ll be back with your regularly scheduled BizTalk bashing right after this break…

  
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2 Comments

  1. Simon Segal Says:

    Look forward to returning after the break and recommencement of the bashing! Seriously though, I am curious about whether you still see
    Biztalk as being relevant from ‘behind’ the service as you once put it?


  2. udidahan Says:

    Simon,

    Consider the case where your service needs to make use of numerous legacy backend systems, from CICS, SAP, old Sybase DBs, each with its own ugly format. That is one of BizTalk’s strengths. As long as you don’t need high performance for those sorts of things (upwards of a couple hundred messages per second), then BizTalk may even turn out to be cost effective.

    A lot of the people I work with would say that the above is a stretch, even for me, to play nice with BizTalk. Yet every product has its sweet spot, however small.

    The general idea is to use the above as a stop-gap solution as you phase out and re-engineer your systems to support the larger SOA vision.


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