This morning my publisher turned a few knobs and pressed a complex series of buttons and officially released my first book, SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009. It’s available for purchase right now from Packt’s web site and should cascade down to other booksellers like Amazon.com within a week.
You can find the complete table of contents here, as well as a free, partial sample chapter on the new WCF SQL Server adapter. What looks like a full, PDF version of that sample chapter (as well as the book’s intro and acknowledgements) can be found here.
I had three general goals when I started this process almost a year ago:
- Cover topics and angles on BizTalk Server that had not been broadly discussed before
- Write the book in a conversational tone that is more like my blog and less like an instruction manual
- Build all examples using real-life scenarios and artifacts and avoid the ubiquitous “Project1”, “TestSchema2” stuff.
In the end, I think I accomplished all three.
First, I included a few things that I’ve never seen done before, such as WCF duplex binding using the out-of-the-box BizTalk adapters, quasi complex event processing with BizTalk, detailed ESB Guidance 2.0 walkthroughs, and the general application of SOA principles to all aspects of BizTalk solutions. Hopefully you’ll find dozens of items that are completely new to you.
Secondly, I don’t truly enjoy technical books that just tell me to “click here, click there, copy this code” so that by the end of the chapter, I have no idea what I just accomplished. Instead, I tried to follow my blog format where I address a topic, show the key steps and reveal the completed solution. I provide all the code samples anyway, so if you need to dig into every single detail, you can find it.
Finally, I decided up front to use actual business use cases for the samples in each chapter of the book. It just doesn’t take THAT much effort, and I hope that it makes the concepts more real than if I had shown a bunch of schemas with elements called “Field1” and “Field42.”
So there you go. It was lots of fun to write this, and I hope a few of you pick up the book and enjoy reading it. My tech reviewers did a great job keeping me honest, so you shouldn’t find too many glaring conceptual flaws or misplaced expletives. If you do have any feedback on it, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
UPDATE: The book is now available in the US on Amazon.com and is steadily creeping up in sales rank. Thanks everyone!
Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 
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