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!

I’m sitting in the very first ever Guerilla BizTalk Server 2006 class. It’s pretty exciting how far BizTalk Server has come since I’ve been on the team. There are over 60 people in the class and the new version likely ships in another 6 or 8 months. The level of interest in what we’re doing with BizTalk Server is extremely gratifying.

Are you wondering where this blog post is going? I haven’t blogged anything is so long I should have lots to say right. Well sure, but the real reason I’m blogging now is because Jon has been bugging me to do it more often. I know it’s only a matter of time before he busts on me in front of class. This is really just a preemptive blog entry.

I do have an excuse for going dark for so long (but it’s like any excuse, i.e. 50% truth and 50% BS). A week and a half ago the BizTalk product group hosted the Business Process, Integration and Workflow Conference on campus. I was one of the owners of that project. The other owner was Burley Kawasaki on my team. Burley is a great guy to work with for sure but his name is so cool. Is that the best name you’ve heard all day or what ;^).

In any case, the conference brought in over 500 attendees from over 200 distinct organizations representing 38 countries from all over the world. It was a lot of work to plan and execute but the show itself was a blast. Hanging out with that many people who are at the forefront of all things BizTalk is about the best time I can imagine.

One of the things that came out of the conference is that people want to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and BizTalk Server 2006 together. Think about the possibilities. WF really does change the landscape for workflow enabled applications. It is great for building single point services which enable scenarios such as workflow within line of business applications, user interface page-flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite workflow for service oriented applications, business rule driven workflow and workflow for systems management. When you tie these services together with WCF some truly amazing possibilities for new applications emerge. Further more by throwing BizTalk into the mix you get a massively scaleable deployment architecture, end-to-end tracking and an instrumentation framework for basically free (among lot’s of other things).

Well another guy on the team, Paul Andrew, and I are looking at building a sample/demo and some technical guidance on how to do exactly these things. He and I own  a series of sessions at the upcoming VS Live conference in San Francisco. Much of that content will be debut there.

So I’ll try to make Jon happy by blogging more often and keep you folks up to date on the convergence of all of these cool new technologies and products right here in this space.

Thanks for checking out my blog. Jon invited me to spin this up on his site. Well that’s not actually what happened, I invited myself but he didn’t put up much of a fight.

I figured that Jon’s blog was so full of practical information that someone had to bring the signal to noise ratio down a little bit. I volunteered to provide an ivory tower viewpoint to Jon’s real world implementation experiences documented in his blog and on his wiki. You see I’m a product manager on the BizTalk Server team at Microsoft.

We don’t actually have ivory towers at Microsoft. I, myself, work in building 3 which is a rather squat ‘X’ shaped building on the east end of campus.

Some folks that I’ve spoken to do subscribe to the opinion that we do work in ivory towers which are far and away from the guys and girls in the trenches who work with our stuff daily. That is what I’d like to dispel in this blog.

I don’t intend to point to all of the latest and coolest stuff that's going on. Scott does that really well. Nor do I intend to delve deep into the BizTalk engine (like Lee) or explore heavy duty developer topics (like Jon). I will point to exceptional BizTalk resources when I find them but the main thrust of this blog will be to discuss things that make you scratch your head when implementing BizTalk Server applications. If you find yourself wondering, “Why the heck did they do that?” then “that” will be a good topic of discussion for this space. If you feel the urge then post a feedback comment here on something about BizTalk Server which sticks in your craw. Comments like that just may implore me to blog thier topics.

By the way, my opinions are not necessarily those of Microsoft or anyone else’s at Microsoft. I don’t make a habit of biting the hand that feeds me but if all I wanted to do was communicate Microsoft approved content I’d commission a whitepaper or issue a press release. Do not confuse my opinion with any official policy. It certainly is not that.

In closing let me thank Jon for providing a platform and you, of course, for participating in it with me.

Regards,

Mike Woods

Sr. Technical Product Manager

Business Process and Integration Division

Microsoft Corporation