Wednesday, March 10, 2010

What’s New in BizTalk 2009 R2…

We have had BizTalk 2006 R2, and now we will soon have BizTalk 2009 R2, so don’t get confused… and BizTalk is far from being replaced it only gets better.

I’ve been looking at 2009 R2 recently, and I can tell you a few things about what’s coming, within reason, as most of this is still under wraps I can’t spill all of the beans.

As an obvious start, there is support for Windows 7 and windows 2008 r2, also support for Visual Studio 2010 as expected, from the previous release a platform shift is required...

The BizTalk Administration console has gone for a few enhancements, making it easier to use particularly in live production environments, where lots of things might be happening at once, adding to the cool things in 2009, when HAT went away and tracking was available from the administration console.

The BizTalk mapper has had a few enhancements, things you would have thought should have been there long ago, and there are still many improvements here that never made it out of the product group that would make life much nicer.

FTP you say, we have been asking for SFTP for a long time, I hear whispers that it might be in this release… along with a whole bunch of new FTP features, keep your mouth open for this one, it looks good to me.

There are some new features introduced, and some enhancements to existing features, not as many as I would have liked… These lie round EDI, there is a focus on making this better in each release as we saw in 2009. EDI is not dead, just as Cobol is not dead.

There are plans to deprecate some features, why you would want to do this? However there are plans, not major or drastic, and you will have to wait and see all of them.

The SOAP Adapter is on the cards for removal, replaced by the WCF-BasicHttp, there is some contention amongst the industry as this adapter still provides some features not found in WCF.

SQL Adapter, this has been coming for some time and nothing thats not expected with most adapters, the old SQL Adapter may go and be replaced by a WCF SQL Adapter.

What does this mean if you want to upgrade? You need to be aware of what’s going, and if you are using any of this, you need to adjust your solution to use the alternatives.

All in all it shows the continued investment in the product going forward.. It’s good news.