Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

Somebody at the product team has really started a rush to push out these nice looking posters. Here is a rather new one:

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Database Infrastructure Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=24662FB5-622C-4E7E-9E83-505D1F664C4D&displaylang=en

And as a service to those of you that haven’t seen anyone of these:

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Runtime Architecture Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8790E652-1DA5-4E80-88FE-B87606233DB4&displaylang=en

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Capabilities Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=34F41573-C552-466F-B531-32CB09A57CDD&displaylang=en

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Scale-Out Configurations Poster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=FF468298-64BE-4947-A086-F61584CAF995&displaylang=en

in case you haven’t seen this yet, Microsoft has a rather interesting marketing campaign around Windows Home Server. One of the parts of the campaign is a book about Home Server which looks like it’s written for kids. The book explains what the magic ‘Server’ in the house is all about.

Microsoft went so far with this campaign that it actually looks like you can buy the book from Amazon! Absolutely hilarious!

If you would like to know more about that weird ‘Server’ that suddenly appeared in your house and what it does, you should definitely read the book!

From the almighty Scott Hanselman:

Released today are four new screencasts about the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions by various members of the ASP.NET team. Every video is available in numerous formats, and note that this also includes re-encoded versions of my Intro to MVC Screencast in a pile of formats including an iPod/iTouch compatible format, as well as ones for the Zune and PSP and a utterly unwatchable 40 meg 3GP one for 3G Phones.

Continue reading here (includes links to the videos).

In this video, James Conard talks with John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos about BizTalk Services.

In the simplest definition, BizTalk Services simplifies application connectivity by extending WCF and providing a set of hosted services. John and Dennis quickly explain BizTalk Services by discussing the challenges with building applications today. Dennis also shows four demos of BizTalk Services and then drops into Visual Studio along the way to show the programming model.

Check out the video here.

Just released (oh well, a couple of months ago), the long awaited BizTalk Server 2006 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation SDK. Use WF modeling and host workflows in BizTalk Server. Note the BTS messaging activities in the image.

The new BizTalk Server edition will most likely sport the Workflow Designer instead of the plain old Orchestration Designer. This probably results into something that looks a lot like what you get with the extentions. With the extentions you won’t have to choose between either product at the start of a project, but you could use both instead.

Note that this release is not supported by Microsoft customer services and should be treated as an SDK sample. If you still want to use this on a project or just want to play with it, you can download it here.

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Microsoft LoadGen 2007 generates message transmission loads to run performance and stress tests for your Microsoft BizTalk Server applications, and provides performance counters to monitor the performance of the infrastructure running BizTalk Server.

This tool is intended for developers and IT professionals to simulate load on a BizTalk Server. Using this tool, you can simulate load to instrument performance and stress against a BizTalk deployment. In addition, this tool may also be extended by developers to simulate load for custom transports. This tool should be used in a test environment only, and should not be used in a production environment. This tool is provided “as-is” and is not supported.

Get it here.

From the source:

This poster lists the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 capabilities bucketed in categories and is designed to provide both a high level and a detailed view of the capabilities and features that are included in the product. (When printed in full scale this poster size is: 35”x 32”)

Download the poster here.

If you’ve ever wanted or needed to parse Excel files using BizTalk, you can now. Some time ago FarPoint released a pipeline dissassembler component for BizTalk Server 2006 which is able to convert Excel files into XML. From their website:

Spread for BizTalk Server 2006 provides a complete solution for integrating Microsoft Excel data seamlessly into your BizTalk applications.

Spread includes a pipeline disassembler that parses Excel data (XLS, Excel 2007 XML, CSV, TXT) into XML, and a pipeline assembler that creates Excel (XLS, Excel 2007 XML) and PDF documents from XML data in BizTalk Applications.

Read more about Spread, download a trial or obtain a license here.