BTUG Fall Session - Steef-Jan Wiggers Blog

Yesterday the last BTUG gathering took place at Unisys in Amsterdam. We had two sessions from Brain Loesgen who was over in Holland for SOA symposium and one from Gerben. Brain sessions:

· ESB Toolkit

· BizTalk Development Best Practices

Gerben session:

· HL7 Accelerator

A lot of people form BTUG community attended session and show that from its inception until today is in fact a strong one. Our little country is a big BizTalk country having a lot of customers using the product in their application landscape with many BTUG members as its implementers.

First session of Brain was around ESB Toolkit and few people still wondered what ESB actually is. I can explain in three sentences, because that all is takes:

ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is an architectural style. It enables enterprises to obtain flexibility (or one can use buzz word agility) towards other systems by hosting services in the bus. Bus can be implemented with a variety of products like BizTalk in combination with the toolkit, open source ESB products/solutions, Oracle SOA Suite, IBM WebSphere and so on.

An enterprise can implement an ESB using BizTalk and ESB Toolkit. Even if an enterprise does not want to implement ESB, BizTalk can be used or play essential role in B2B, EAI, Rfid and still use parts of the toolkit like exception management portal. This offers customers more added value as they can be very flexible in a way how to use BizTalk and use it extra capabilities like ESB Toolkit or for instance the BizTalk Adapter Pack. This gives BizTalk a strong position in the market for application servers (see for instance my previous post on DTAP).

Second session by Brain was the best of three sessions regarding best practices for development in BizTalk. You can find similar session on channel 9, where Brian gives session to Swedish user group.

Next session will be next year in January. Some interesting latest posts I discovered today are:

· PDF download regarding series by Kent Weare about integration BizTalk and Sharepoint

· WCF Extensibility Guidance on MSDN

Technorati BizTalk BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2009

Author: Steef-Jan Wiggers

Steef-Jan Wiggers is all in on Microsoft Azure, Integration, and Data Science. He has over 15 years’ experience in a wide variety of scenarios such as custom .NET solution development, overseeing large enterprise integrations, building web services, managing projects, designing web services, experimenting with data, SQL Server database administration, and consulting. Steef-Jan loves challenges in the Microsoft playing field combining it with his domain knowledge in energy, utility, banking, insurance, healthcare, agriculture, (local) government, bio-sciences, retail, travel, and logistics. He is very active in the community as a blogger, TechNet Wiki author, book author, and global public speaker. For these efforts, Microsoft has recognized him a Microsoft MVP for the past 8 years. View all posts by Steef-Jan Wiggers