Product Description

This book provides insight into how industry experts have successfully architected, developed, and maintained Microsoft BizTalk Server in mission–critical environments. Authored by highly–regarded consultants with a wealth of knowledge on designing, building, and operating enterprise applications using BizTalk, this comprehensive guide gives you the techniques and best practices you’ll need to develop effective projects.

Darren Jefford is a Principal Consultant with the Microsoft UK Application Development Consulting (ADC) team who has extensive real–world experience with BizTalk Server and the broader Microsoft platform. Kevin B. Smith formerly worked as a Technical Lead Software Design Engineer for the BizTalk Server Product Team and helped ship three versions of BizTalk Server. Ewan Fairweather works as a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft, providing onsite support to enterprise customers, including maintaining and optimizing their BizTalk Server solutions.

Achitects, developers, testers, and administrators will achieve instant success when they apply the deep technical information covered in this book. They will better appreciate the internal workings of BizTalk Server and will understand detailed solutions for challenges often experienced with BizTalk–based systems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94028 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 696 pages

Patric McElroy, Product Unit Manager, BizTalk Server, Microsoft Corporation
This book is an indispensable resource for solution architects and developers who want to dig deeper into BizTalk. It is valuable material that has been written by insiders with deep experience in architecting and delivering solutions for our most demanding enterprise customers.

From the Back Cover

Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

This book provides insight into how industry experts have successfully architected, developed, and maintained Microsoft BizTalk Server in mission–critical environments. Authored by highly–regarded consultants with a wealth of knowledge on designing, building, and operating enterprise applications using BizTalk, this comprehensive guide gives you the techniques and best practices you′ll need to develop effective projects.

Darren Jefford is a Principal Consultant with the Microsoft UK Application Development Consulting (ADC) team who has extensive real–world experience with BizTalk Server and the broader Microsoft platform. Kevin B. Smith formerly worked as a Technical Lead Software Design Engineer for the BizTalk Server Product Team and helped ship three versions of BizTalk Server. Ewan Fairweather works as a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft, providing onsite support to enterprise customers, including maintaining and optimizing their BizTalk Server solutions.

Achitects, developers, testers, and administrators will achieve instant success when they apply the deep technical information covered in this book. They will better appreciate the internal workings of BizTalk Server and will understand detailed solutions for challenges often experienced with BizTalk–based systems.

What you will learn from this book

• How the BizTalk Engine works and how to develop effective pipeline components

• How to develop BizTalk orchestrations that achieve maximum performance

• Methods for using Business Activity Monitoring within your solution for enterprise–wide instrumentation

• How to utilize the rules engine within your solutions to produce quality and reliability

• Techniques for conducting performance and scalability tests to identify bottlenecks

• Ways to minimize the latency of your solution to meet challenging low latency requirements

• How system administrators can proactively manage and maintain mission–critical BizTalk solutions

• Features for BizTalk Server 2006 R2, such as the BAM Interceptor for Windows® Workflow

Who this book is for

This book is for architects, developers, testers, and administrators involved in the development of a BizTalk Server 2004 or 2006 solution.

"This book provides a fantastic insight into the inner workings of BizTalk, making it an invaluable resource for all those things you would otherwise never know. As you learn the ′tricks of the trade′ from these experienced engineers, you quickly realize why everyone who has anything to do with BizTalk simply MUST read this book."
—Yossi Dahan, Managing Consultant, Sabra Ltd.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real–world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author
Darren Jefford (Wiltshire, UK) joined Microsoft UK in 2002, and has worked with BizTalk Server 2004 with various customers in the UK since 2003.  He has been involved with the architecture design, development, testing and deployment of a number of large scale BizTalk Servers. He has a popular blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/darrenj/) that has allowed him to become one of the best known worldwide experts in this space.

Customer Reviews

Get great BizTalk insight from the horse's mouth
The first thing I want to point out (as it's only *just* out) is that I've actually read this book - and in its entirety - and I wasn't paid for it. So basically, I have no reason to misrepresent it ;-)

In my opinion, there are very few people on the planet in the position of being able to produce a book such as this. The authors are, fortunately, in this practically unique position having either worked in the product group or MCS for Microsoft over many years. Essentially if these guys don't know, or their friends (see the acknowledgements for a veritable who's who of the BizTalk Product Group) don't know - then I'm not sure anyone does.

Where this book succeeds (and others have failed) is two-fold: it starts where the documentation tails off and is written by a very small number of authors who a) have actually met and b) really are very good. so what you get is something that genuinely *is* written by the right people who know their subject areas inside-out rather than a bunch of guys who had (just) enough spare time (and knowledge) to bash out a chapter each.

Now, for the content. This book starts with a lot of assumptions about knowledge of BizTalk and its dependent technologies (xml, .net, c#, xsd etc, etc) - although Chapter 1 serves as a primer, it's not for newbies. It does however provide enough background to enable intermediates to still be able to read it without constantly referencing other sources. This of course, is a balance of reiteration and convenience. I think it strikes this perfectly as even where documented information is covered, it is explained and exposited further to delve deeper into the hows and whys. For example, dedicated chapters on low latency, testing and scalability set it apart from other books. Make no mistake, this is real world guidance and parts of it will make uncomfortable reading for some - and it's all the better for it.

BizTalk is a complex product, this book acknowledges and reflects that and if you want a BizTalk book that goes beyond the basics and into hitherto unchartered territory, jump in. Highly recommended.

Don't wait, just go and buy the book.
There are only very few books where you'll read end-to-end and also multiple times. Professional BizTalk Server 2006 (PBS 20006) is one of those kinds.

I can see the authors have strained themselves to the edges to get the quality. You can say that from the writing style, structure of the content, amount of quality data present in the book. I judge the quality of the chapters with 2 main criteria's:

1. Number of lines I underline,
2. Am I just skipping the pages or actually reading it.

Most of the chapter in PBS 2006 satisfies both the points, now my whole book is scribbled all over the place and it took me longer time to finish the chapters, because I didn't skip the pages, but read it line by line.

If you are or want to be a proper BizTalk developer, don't wait just go and buy the book.

The Biztalk SAS Survival Guide....
This book is a great SAS survival guide for people working with Biztalk Server...

I'd read as far as page 4, when the first nugget appeared, a problem which we came across in our labs at Microsoft: The way some service providers use namespaces and the problems that causes with Biztalk. If this book is littered with Darren's, and the other authors, findings over the years, then it's worth anybody using Biztalk to pick up this title.

The book has a lot of hints and tips which will help you avoid pitfalls, causing you weeks of agony and frustration, it's a casual read, and even in my initial exploration of Biztalk, brought back memories of a product, which like the great white shark, is misunderstood.