Friday, September 10, 2010

European BizTalk Conference recap

I'm back at the office after two days at Microsoft in Stockholm and the European BizTalk Conference where I enjoyed myself together with another 150 attendees. A good event as always with the BizTalk User Group Sweden and great sessions that mostly covered the platform around BizTalk for a change.

The three speakers, Richard Seroter, Stephen W. Thomas and Ewan Fairweather, are three of the five authors of the recently published book Applied architecture patterns on the Microsoft platform, which in turn caused the event to follow the basic chapter layout of the book (a book I will review as soon as I have browsed through my copy).

Day one consisted to a large extent of sessions on the different technologies that are available. SQL Server, BizTalk 2010, AppFabric, Azure and WF 4.0 were covered. Day two had sessions covering scenarios where each of the technologies were used in the solution. On this second day, StreamInsight was used in a presentation as well as the last technology presented at the conference. All sessions got taped and so videos should be up on the net within a few weeks I presume.

A very important lesson learned at the conference was a discussion on the anxiety of BizTalk developers considering all this new technology emerging. The speakers made a strong point that BizTalk is not to be replaced by AppFabric, WF 4.0, StreamInsight, SQL Server functionality and whatever there might be. All this new technology can and will instead be used as a complement to BizTalk in order to leverage functionality that previously was hard or impossible to pull off using solely the BizTalk platform. A good example of this was shown in the StreamInsight session with a vast amount of data being streamed and analyzed in realtime.

All in all, a good two days with the crème de la crème of BizTalkers in the region as well as a few from further away in the world.

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