I have the best job in the world. Jon Flanders is working on a project for the BizTalk and Windows Workflow Foundation product groups so I set up some meetings for him yesterday. In between meetings he was chilling in my office so I started asking him questions about WF (being the BizTalk Server Technical Product Manager I’m not as tight on WF as I could be). So Jon is in my office doing a detailed drilldown on the capabilities of the WF designer in Visual Studio and it occurs to me that hundreds of people have paid good money for the privilege of sitting in a crowded room to hear Jon do this sort of thing. Yesterday he was my personal tutor. Amazing…

So now that BizTalk Server beta 2 is out the door Kris Horrocks (the other BizTalk TPM) and I are putting together a set of demos. We’ve currently got a VPC image with a set of purchase order scenario demos on Beta 2. We’ll figure out how to make either the demos or the image available to partners soon. We still need to script and document it so it may be January before that’s done.

I’m also working on a reviewers guide for Beta 2. That should be ready in early January as well. Jon is writing it and my expectation is that it’ll be pretty good.

The demos for the San Francisco VS Live conference are coming along very nicely. Check out the session abstracts here. Jon, Paul and I are building them out now (mostly Jon :^). They’ll be brand new demo/samples and we’ll provide download instructions at the show. I’m working on recruiting Eddie Churchill to present the BizTalk Futures session. He’s a great guy and a truly funny presenter. Chances are good that he’ll be there but I’ll make sure to get someone good either way.

Next week I’m flying down to the Land of Aus to visit summer. I’ll be speaking at the VS Live Sydney conference and working with some customers there and in Brisbane. It’s my first trip down under and I’m looking forward to it.

Like I said at the top of the post; I have the best job in the world!