Holidays are over and I enjoyed my stay in Spanish Pyrenees and France (Béziers). In case you ever visit the Spanish Pyrenees you might see sights like this when hiking through the mountains.
Now back to reality. Sun has stop shining (it will return Thursday though) here in the Netherlands and it is back work.
Today’s story in this post will be on Richard Hallgren, who works as a Solution Architect at iBiz Solutions, a specialized consultancy company with about 20 employees (and growing). It mainly focuses on integration and data centric solutions based on Microsoft and Tibco technology. iBiz has a number of larger customers spread all over Scandinavia continent.
“In my role as a Solution Architect I’m usually responsible for the overall architecture, making sure we follow best practices such as having automated builds, automated tests, a clear strategy, clear requirements, documentation platforms, working source code workflows etc, etc. Basically making sure we have all the pieces needed to deliver high quality projects on time to a happy customer.”
Richard has been working non-stop with BizTalk since early 2006, doing both development, maintenance and architecture work. He has touched on and worked with most parts of the product.
“Starting from version BizTalk 2006 BizTalk has been a great product for us solving many problems that used to be really tricky handling using custom solutions.”
Richard has a clear view on BizTalk development:
“Using BizTalk the right way one can also be extremely productive both as an individual and as a team. This however requires have a number of things in place such as clear development guidelines, workflows, tests, builds etc. The importance of these practices are often overlooked by new users coming to BizTalk which often leads to a huge mess when projects are getting bigger – in the end give BizTalk a bad name.”
and architecture:
“Further there are things such as queuing based architectures (synchronous vs. asynchronous), message based architecture, the importance of tracking, logging and documentation that isn’t always that clear when starting working with BizTalk. Structuring and creating best possible architectures (were BizTalk is one piece) and having all the different pieces mentioned above in place to create a great development/project tools set is currently my main focus of expertise and something I find very interesting.”
Final words from Richard:
“When it comes to the blog I’ll try and blog a bit more and will try and add a few posts on how to use NuGet, git and TeamCity, TFS Services and StreamInsight in your development cycle. Automated BizTalk documentation (see BtsWebDoc) and Azure BizTalk Services are other areas where I will try to add value to the community in the future.“
I would like to thank Richard for his time and contributions to the community.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
