The BizTalk community is awesome. I get to spend time with many of them during my travels abroad when speaking to them. A week ago I had the opportunity to speak in Porto during the Oporto BizTalk Innovation event. My upcoming next BizTalk events in Italy (June) and Norway (September) are planned and its preparations have already started.
BizTalk Server 2013 will soon be generally available as it is in RTM right now. I believe many BizTalk professionals that have access to MSDN and must have downloaded and installed it already on a VM. Like one of my colleagues, who has already posted a nice article on which possible issues you might run into when installing the 2013 RTM.
The story today for the BizTalk community series will be on Mitch VanHelden, who also recently blogged on the RTM release.
Mitch is 27 years old, married to Anne-Lore and has two lovely kids (a 4-year old boy Lars and a 2-year old daughter Chloë). He lives with his family in a small town called Rotem, in Belgium. It happens to be that Mitch likes Metal like myself. Both he and his wife listen to metal music and try to catch a gig once in a while. Sounds familiar to me 🙂
Mitch plays the drums, and has also been in a band for a brief moment, but he just did not have enough time for it. He spends the spare time that he has as much as possible with his family, and to play soccer and badminton. To keep a bit in shape in between seasons he tries to play tennis during the summer. All of these sports are practiced with some of the local amateur clubs.
“I also love snowboarding, but as the children are still a bit young I haven’t been on a snowboarding trip for several years now.”
Mitch is also a fan of the Belgian soccer team KRC Genk and enjoys watching the national soccer team of Germany.
Mitch started his career as a general .NET developer back in 2008, but soon came in touch with BizTalk (BizTalk2006 R2 to be more precise). And he just knew that this was the career path he would like to pursue and started specializing in developing BizTalk applications.
Mitch currently works as a consultant for Cnext in Belgium. His role is no longer limited to only BizTalk development. He also has an active administrator role these days and is gaining more and more experience in architecture. One of his goals is to set out a learning path in BizTalk monitoring and best practices with the purpose of gaining more knowledge and experience. One of his current activities in that area is working with BizTalk360.
“Besides my daily working tasks, I’m also the sole contributor and administrator of the Cnext Blog. I also have some blog contributions on BizTalkadminsBlogging and my own blog. Although lately I’m not nearly posting as much as I would like to. Yet I would love to thank all the people reading my blog, and hope many of them have found a solution to their problem or at least helped them getting in the right direction.”
Mitch has the following to say about BizTalk Server:
“There have been quite some rumors about the future of BizTalk. But I’m glad Microsoft comes with the all new release of BizTalk 2013 soon, stating that BizTalk is here to stay. Which is a good thing, as more and more companies are using it. And I think BizTalk Server is just the absolute best to use for integration purposes. It is very powerful, reliable, flexible and comes with all kinds of integration possibilities.”
The final comments from Mitch:
“Thanks Steef-Jan for this great opportunity, and also congrats on your blog. I love reading your blog as it always have the newest technologies in BizTalk explained and tested.”
and
“I like to call out to all to also share your knowledge with the BizTalk community, it certainly helps people out.”
Thanks Mitch for your time and contributions to the BizTalk community.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
