Biztalk Build or Buy ???

I have been asked a lot, "where is the power of Biztalk?" and that’s comes from experienced Software engineers, they always tend to say "Well, we can do this!!”, and in fact that's true, if you took a bird’s eye view on what Biztalk does, it's primarily two things,, Business Process Management and Messaging Solutions, and this involves basically handling messages from different sources with different formats.

So what about the engineer who said that he can do this, well the answer is simple, Yes, you can do custom code to query a web service and get the response and then transform the message using XSLT and possibly apply some business rules checks. However when you try to deploy this solution in an enterprise, you will start facing some problems that you will have to address.
First, you will need to worry about the online vs. offline support of your application, what if the web service is not available? And you need to re-try the call; you will hence need to develop some sort of service that does this for you. Also, what about the business rules that you have applied; you need to give access to the business users to change them at any time, so you'd probably create a separate business rules store with its own configuration and database.

What about the throughput of the messages, what if the load on the server increased, could your application be load balanced? , you'd then have to create some sort of a load balancing service that is could be distributed on multiple servers...!!

You will find so many "what if" in this application that you will eventually end up building a complete framework just to support your initially small application!!
This framework of tools is what Microsoft calls Biztalk Server!!!

Biztalk Server comes with out-of-the-box support for long-running transactions; Rules engine storage, scalable infrastructure, tracking capabilities and much more; basically all what you need to host an integration/BPM solution.

So if you are targeting enterprise level solutions, I believe the equation turns in the favor of "Buy" not "Build”.

I found out about a week ago that I received the Microsoft MVP Award for BizTalk. I am really pleased to be part of this community and I am looking forward to continuing to help the BizTalk developer community. Thanks to everyone who nominated and supported me (special thanks to Mohamed Wahby (Microsoft Egypt) and Mohamed Karam (ITWorx) ).

Biztalk Server and Windows Server 2003 Service pack 2

i faced today a weird problem with the installation of Biztalk Server...

After installing BizTalk server 2006, I configured both “Enterprise SSO” and “Group” Successfully.
When trying to configure “BizTalk Runtime”, it fails with the following error:

“Could not deploy 'Microsoft.BizTalk.KwTpm.StsDefaultPipelines' on computer 'WS2003-VM-03'. Please check if BizTalk is installed correctly. (SeedCfg)”

I tried un-install then re-install BizTalk server and still getting the same error.

Here is my configuration:
OS: Windows 2003 Server + SP2
BizTalk Server 2006 – BizTalk databases are on remote SQL Server.

the problem was fixed when i installed the Biztalk Server on a Windows 2003 with SP1 .. it seems like there is something with SP2 that couldn't register that assembly..

Cheers ,,

Ahmed

BiztalkersEgypt Site Launched

in the past couple of month i was thinking about creating a Biztalk Server community in Egypt, I'm already a board member in a technical club called Cutting-Edge where we organize technical sessions and seminars for software developers.

i have started a Special interest group inside the club focused on BizTalk technologies and called it "Biztalkers", i have also delivered 2 sessions in the past month to introduce Biztalk to the club members...

i believe the next step is to have an online community for biztalk developers/architects in Egypt and the Middleast where we could all learn from each other and provide video tutorials on how to start biztalking :) , that's where the idea of BiztalkersEgypt Came from ...

The site is now up and running http://www.biztalkersEgypt.com and users are starting to register in it. i have also put a forum on the site where users could submit their questions and concerns..

i believe this is a very important step in promoting the awareness for this product in Egypt and the MiddleEast in a very simplified yet efficient manner.

A Must Read Troubleshooting guide ..

i have been using this troubleshooting guide for a while right now and i believe its a must read for all biztalk developers, it covers sections about debugging orchestrations and monitoring the performance and lots more ...

you can find the link here ..

http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/7/6/376a6f6c-8c97-4ab5-9d5a-416c76793fbb/bts06developerstroubleshootingguide.doc

Enjoy Biztalking :)

'BizTalk Server: 8 Tips And Tricks For Better BizTalk Programming

i have came across this really interesting tips about biztalk programming, it really summarizes most of the pitfalls that most developers fall into, and as we always say, it's all about design, you can do lots of things with Biztalk, and you can do them in many different ways, the most important thing is how to do things the right way... :)


Enjoy Biztalking :)

'BizTalk Server: 8 Tips And Tricks For Better BizTalk Programming,'bloggerForm','scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300,top=175,left=75,status=yes,resizable=yes

Any Element in Biztalk Schema

we had a working orchestration today that needs to send notification for the failed messages, one problem came around, the schema of the failed message doesn't match anything to given to the orchestration !!! ,

the solution was so simple, we created a new generic schema, that contained the same root node and under it the Magical "any" element node type.!!!

so now the notification orchestration will only check the root node , and it will accept the message no matter what elements come under the root... and that was IT :)

Cheers :)

Ahmed