Pro BizTalk 2009 Book

I had the pleasure of tech reviewing the Pro BizTalk 2009 book by George Dunphy and  company and while a “real” review isn’t appropriate given my participation, I can at least point out what’s new and interesting.

So, as you probably know, this is the sequel to the well-received Pro BizTalk 2006 book.  As with the last one, this book has a nice introduction to the BizTalk technology.  The authors updated this chapter to talk a bit about SOA, WCF and the cloud. There remains a good discussion here about when to choose buy (e.g. BizTalk) vs. build.

The solution setup and organization topics remain fairly comprehensive and an important read for technical leads on BizTalk projects.

The core “how BizTalk works”, “pipeline best practices” and “orchestration patterns” remain relatively the same (and useful) with VB.NET code still used for these demos.  Just a heads up there.  The BRE chapter continues to be some of the most comprehensive stuff written on the topic.

The Admin sections cover new ground on automated testing using Team Suite and LoadGen. 

You’ll find a whole new chapter on the BizTalk WCF adapters with topics such as security, transactions, metadata exchange, and an introductory look at the Managed Service Engine.

There’s another new chapter that covers the WCF LOB Adapter SDK.  There hasn’t been too much written (outside of product documentation) on this topic, so it should be useful to have another source of reference.  There is a good discussion here as to when to use a WCF LOB Adapter vs. WCF Service, but the majority of the chapter contains a walkthrough on how to build a custom adapter.

For those IBM-heads among you, the chapter on HIS 2009 should be a thrilling read.  Some very well written info on how to use HIS and the key features of it.

Finally, there’s an excellent chapter on the ESB Toolkit written by Pete Kelcey.  You’ll find a great dissection of the ESB components and explanation of the reasons for the Toolkit.

There was initially a chapter on EDI planned (and unfortunately still referenced to in the book itself and in some collateral), but it got yanked out at the last minute.  So, beware if you are purchasing this book JUST for that discussion.

So, if you have the previous edition of the book, you’ll have to weigh whether you want to buy the book for the updated text and new chapters on topics like WCF adapters, ESB Toolkit and testing.  If you’re new to BizTalk and looking for a guide book on how to understand the product, set up teams, and apply best practices, this is a great read.

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