Windows Azure BizTalk Services was released November 2013 and now within six months’ time there is a book about available. It has been written by Karthik Bharathy a Lead Program Manager in the BizTalk product group and longtime BizTalk veteran and Microsoft Integration MVP Jon Fancey.
I have had the pleasure of being one the technical reviewers of this book and I must say the authors have done an excellent job. Is this a biased opinion. No, because:
- I have been working extensively with WABS and its predecessors EAI/Labs (beta). So I was able to put the thumbscrews on both of them, which resulted in valuable feedback for the book
- of the Microsoft BizTalk Product Group involvement, and they are very committed to it,
- Scott Guthrie endorses it and wrote a forward.
WABS provides EAI or B2B services through the cloud and both are covered in the book. It is a promising technology with the increase demand for integration. The landscape we know today has changed with the rise of the cloud (internet), devices and on premise growth of the IT-systems (including mainframe, servers, applications, and services). Integration of it is key and so is having an integration service in the cloud to support new hybrid scenarios.
You will learn the following while reading it from cover to cover:
- Use the EAI and B2B features of BizTalk Services
- Connect with Line-Of-Business systems in your datacenter on-premises
- Create bridges and configure them to process and route messages
- Design transforms
- Using custom code
- Address and diagnose problems
- Operations using the API
- Migrate from BizTalk Server to BizTalk Services
If you are new to WABS or want to learn more than I definitely recommended it. Even I learned quite a few thing during the review of the chapters. You can download a sample chapter in case you are interested. It is about bridges. You can buy the book from Packt, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.
In case you are interested in more content than you can visit the TechNet Wiki article: Windows Azure BizTalk Services Resources on the TechNet Wiki.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
