BizTalk Community Series: Introducing Rob Fox
It’s spring time and the sun is shining. BizTalk Server has been released and a lot of events are organized or are about to take place; launch parties, user group meeting and large events like TechEd’s. The BizTalk community is vibrant. A lot of us MVP’s will be on stage coming weeks at these different events. We are joined by people from the community. One of them is Rob Fox. Today’s story is on him.
Rob, living together in the south of The Netherlands with his
lovely girlfriend Marjolein, a dog and two cats. He works as a BizTalk
Consultant for QNH and if he has any time left he likes to build apps for the
Windows (Phone) environment.
“The last one is just for fun. Making money out of it is pretty
difficult if you are not busy with it full time.”
Besides spending time
with Marjolein, walking the dog, building an app or the occasional website, Rob
also does (Front-of-House) sound and tour management for one of Holland's
bigger metal bands - Carach Angren.
“It's been fun to do, because it's just a different world altogether
and it brings you all over the world.”
Like myself Rob is a metalhead and has similar musical taste. He is a catcher in a very un-European sport,
baseball and he can be found at the gym a few times a week.
“The gym is in the Snow world building, so sometimes I might end
up on a snowboard instead :) During the summer months I also like to ride
the mountain bike.”
Rob mainly focusses on
architecture and developing, sometimes forced into administration as well,
because in most smaller companies you are "the guy who knows
BizTalk".
“Although to most developers BizTalk is seen as evil, I like the
product. I guess it takes a few years to appreciate the product as
you will use more and more aspects of BizTalk. Problem solving skills will
increase heavily and you will also fall far less for all of BizTalk's pitfalls.
As your solutions start to be more robust, it works like a charm. Often other
developers will accuse BizTalk of doing something wrong, but in the end it will
always be either another system failing or me. Not having configured everything
like I should or even a programming error, of course very very rarely :)”
Rob has a clear vision
on integration:
“A new era of integration has started now (not only for
Microsoft). We are starting to integrate with the cloud more and more. Therefor
bringing BizTalk's features to the cloud will be pretty important. I have
been busy with Windows Azure for a while now and I am pretty curious what
BizTalk Services will have to offer.”
Rob hasn’t posted
something on his own blog in a while and right now it's even down.
“Something to do with an instance and an object... I want to
pick it up again soon and will be rebuilding the blog. I also roam around the
BizTalk forums and answer questions, if I know the answer that is. Contributing
to the community is a pretty important thing. If we hadn't had all those active
bloggers and forum-dwellers like Steef-Jan, we would probably still be trying
to solve some of the HRESULT issues we had.”
Rob likes presenting
and he has done some talks about BizTalk at the Dutch BizTalk User Group, but he
can also be found doing a talk on Windows Phone at other conferences. He is not
the serious talker though, work is serious enough. Rob likes to mingle around
in code (hands-on) and try and trigger the audience to pick it up themselves.
A final word from Rob:
“Steef-Jan, thanks for this opportunity. You contributed a lot
to the community and I am pretty thankful for that. Some of my solutions may
have been based on some of your posts. And of course always fun chatting at
meetings, whether it's about BizTalk or just some kick-ass bands.”
I
like to thank Rob for his time and contributions to the community.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
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