European BizTalk Conference: Stockholm

Few weeks ago I registered for BizTalk 2010 Release Party in Stockholm organized by Swedish BizTalk User Group led by Mikael Håkansson and Johan Hedberg. I went to this event that took place this week on Wednesday and Thursday. It turned out that BizTalk wasn’t released yet, it will happen somewhere at end of this month as we were told. Event was renamed to European BizTalk Conference, while most sessions where about AppFabric which is good (I will tell why in a minute).

AppFabric can mean two things: Windows Azure platform AppFabric and Windows Server AppFabric enable IT professionals to build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud. It is important to know when people talk about AppFabric in what context on- or off premises. Just recently the Windows Server AppFabric Customer Advisory Team released the Windows Server AppFabric Architecture Guide.There have one good resource already, but there is more:0547_EN_MockupCover-final This book just released through Pack Publishing and is available also through Amazon. It was shamelessly promoted by the authors (Richard, Ewan and Stephen) doing presentations during the event and I bought it. Why? Are they nice guys, yes, but it is the message it contains and they gave during the presentations. Message is by my interpretation BizTalk can be a good fit in an architecture with its range of mature, proven, well evolved adapters and its scalable, robust, durable application architecture, but there are more technologies (i.e. AppFabric, Azure) available that can be better suited for certain scenario’s. Some of these scenario’s are written down in this book and being explained during the sessions.

I must say I have enjoyed this event and my first visit to one of the Nordic countries in Europe. Thanks to Swedish BizTalk User Group organizing it and Microsoft Sweden hosting the event, the speakers for their time sharing experience/knowledge, and for bringing the book to our attention :). I also like to thank Alan for taking me for diner in Stockholm on Wednesday evening and Peter on Thursday.

Cheers!


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Comments

Richard said…
Glad you made it and appreciate your thoughts. Look forward to meeting up with you again in the new year.
6:20 AM
Jasper Defesche said…
Hi Steef-Jan,

I was wondering, in case one uses the biztalk map in a .net 4.0 workflow, is a biztalk license required?

Nice meeting you in Sweden by the way :-)

I think I'll buy the book as well, although I feel the presenters were bypassing BizTalk to fast in their case studies.

Regards
Jasper
11:10 AM
Steef-Jan Wiggers said…
Hi Jasper, it was nice finally meeting you. Good question and my thinking is that you might need to have a BizTalk license. I have used the mapper in WF 4.0 through using example explained in http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/biztalk-wf-wcf-better-together.aspx. I think after using this example in my VM with BizTalk installed on it you will need a license.
2:06 PM
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