Harry Pierson talked a bit about the stuff he's learning on BizTalk Server in Morning Coffee 12 entry (btw, loving them, keep it up!). Looks like he's attending a great class with Matt Milner . A few comments that sparked my interest: Harry says that conceptually BizTalk hasn't changed all that much since the 2000/2002 days. I'm not sure I'd agree, but that would depend on what he means by "conceptually" I'd say that from an architecture point of view, the the change between 2002 and 2004 was a very significant one, requiring you to adapt to a lot of new stuff. Here's why I feel this way: The orchestration engine was pretty much rewritten. The designer by itself is a great improvement, but it's far more than that: There's no more interpreted XLANG, now we have XLANG/s Orchestrations (*.odx) are compiled down to C# and then to MSIL. Now we have a pretty powerful correlation mechanism as well as convoys. Native .NET support (it is .NET after all!) The messaging model changed significantly: Most of the terminology changed. Remember channels, AICs and Receive Functions? The messaging model is now mostly symmetrical, unlike in 2000/2002 where the send and receive sides were very different. The pipeline model is far nicer (have I mentioned I love pipelines? they're fantastic!). The adapter framework. Sure beats down anything we had in 2000/2002! Writing adapters is still hard, but writing them in .NET is far easier. Application Integration Components (AIC) were a kludge, anyway. New
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