Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

As per monday October 7th Microsoft released BizTalk Server 2006 CTM. This release is only available for users with a MSDN or TechNet account. The CTM release of BizTalk Server 2006 is fully compatible with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I just can smell the RTM version coming very soon.

I’ve just watched a clip from Channel9 featuring Eddie Churchill. In the video he demonstrates a prototype of the future BizTalk mapper. The new mapper will contain some very impressive features as I must say. Some of them make the life of the mapper a lot easier, especially when dealing with large maps.

Some of the features which are shown in the video are:

• Different drawing densities for lines which are in view and which aren’t.
• Highlighting all lines coming from and going to a functoid when the functoid is selected.
• Automatic scrolling to elements when line or functoid is selected.
• Sibling coalesence, which folds unmapped elements so only the mapped elements are visible.
• Automapping or Intellimapping, which finds the best target or source element to map to based on a very intelligent algorithm.
• Scrollbar ticks, which identifies where in the document you can find things you’re interested in.

While watching the clip I could only thing of one thing: gimme gimme gimme!!! Unfortunately the new mapper will not be shipped with BizTalk 2006. When the mapper will be shipped is not yet known as this is just a prototype. It’s also highly possible that we see some features in other Microsoft Application before the mapper is even shipped.

I recommend that every BizTalk engineer who hasn’t seen the video yet will watch it right away. You can find the clip here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=126990