I love this concept of cookbooks; they follow the same concept as your kitchen cookbook, bunch of recipes to prepare a fancy meal.

You are never going to sit and read all the recipes in one night, you are going to keep the book as reference and follow the recipe you fancy.

Technical cookbook got similar characteristics. There are various recipes, you pick the one that's more relevant to the piece of work you are doing. Short, Sweet and up to the point.

This new cookbook from Steef-Jan Wiggers consist of over 50+ BizTalk recipes, covering various proven design patterns, best practices, or simply showing you some tips and tricks you never come across.

I personally know Steef-Jan very well and know about this book project for a long time. In fact I was chosen as one of the technical reviewers for the book, but had to pull out due to my commitments with BizTalk360.

Writing a book is not a easy task, most of these guys don't do it for making money. It's their passion and interest in technology that drives them to write such valuable books sacrificing  a great deal on their personal life.

With the effort that's gone into this book by Steef-Jan over the last year or so, I'm fairly confident it's worth every penny.

Patterns and Practices are very critical in any software development project. Problems tend to recur, and we tend to solve them time and time again. Over time we tend to address these problems in a more and more elegant way. Understanding the common patterns and solutions that's already been widely in the industry greatly increases the chances of success for any solution.

That's exactly what Dan Rosanova attempted to address in his book BizTalk Serve 2010 patterns. He is a good friend of mine from the MVP community and I can safely attest he is a knowledgeable guy when it comes to BizTalk Server.

In this book Dan provided a thorough introduction to Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010, covering breadth of the product in the first half of the book. In the second half of the book Dan has taken a real world scenario and embarked on the process of adapting BizTalk Server 2010 with interesting patterns and best practices.

The book also covers the breadth of the BizTalk solution life cycle right from defining Visual Studio solution structure to disaster recovery and administration. Various topologies, clustering options, etc are covered.

As the heading suggests various patterns like convoys, zombies, parallel processing, broker pattern etc are explained in detail. I'll highly recommend this book for anyone starting to look into BizTalk Server. A success of the product will depend on the level of documentation and resources available. In that sense, it really exciting time to be in BizTalk world with the list of books that's came in 2011

and the line up for 2012.

-Saravana  

"This is my honest opinion and I'm not paid to do this review"

First thing, don't just assume "BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed" is the revision of "BizTalk Server 2004" released 7 years ago. It's normal tendency for people to not buy the revised books once they had the title in their bookshelf. I have known majority of the authors and reviewers of the book personally and I can confirm this books is written from ground up and took the authors nearly 2 years to complete. These guys are really passionate about what they are doing and well known for their efforts within the community.

As mentioned in Charles blog "Not your average Joe", I'll say it applies to all the authors/reviewers (Jan Eliasen, Brian Loesgen, Scott Colestock, Jon Flanders, Anush Kumar, Gijs in 't Veld, Randal van Splunteren)of this book.

Some of the things unique about the book worth your money.

Rules Engine:
This is the Only book available in the market that covers Rules Engine in Detail. Nearly 200 pages just on rules engine. If I'm the publisher of this book, I would have taken those chapters and published as a separate book :-) Just kidding. Charles Young is predominantly known in the community (not just BizTalk) for his efforts and interest in Rules engine. His passion for rules engine is clearly expressed in this book.

WCF Extensibility:
When you are working on .NET you got the option to work with both code and configuration file. But in BizTalk case configuration file option (via changes in adapter UI) is the only choice. So, it's very important to understand which parts of the WCF extensibility architecture is available as a BizTalk developer. There is a dedicated chapter in this book explaining this.

The book tries to cover all the core concepts of BizTalk like Schemas, Maps, Pipelines, Orchestrations, BAM and Adapters. This is not one of those books where it's filled with screen shots and boring how to articles. Instead in every chapter they covered from the basic to advanced topics. Some of the examples include

• Versioning, Testing Schemas
• Advanced mapping concepts, Cross Referencing
• Convoys, Transactions, Persistence points
• Streaming concepts in Pipeline, testing strategies
• Detailed usage of all the Adapters that ships with BizTalk 2010.

There are couple of chapters on ESB, RFID, Administration/Deployment concepts etc.

You are not going to read this book from front to back (slightly over 800 pages), this will be one of those bible kind of book, you keep it in your shelf and reference it when you are stuck or when you wanted to know about particular topic like Adapters, ESB, AppFabric usage, Rules, New Administration functionalities etc.

In general, if you are working in BizTalk and wanted to read about the latest material, and not referring to some 5 year old blog posts, which sometimes could be out of date with content. You should simply buy this book.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Found via Rahul Garg

This training kit contains a complete set of materials that will enable you to learn the core developer capabilities in BizTalk Server 2010. This kit includes lab manuals, PowerPoint presentations and videos, all designed to help you learn about BizTalk Server 2010. There is also an option below to download a Virtual Machine that is ready for you to use with the training kit.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=14865

The material looks really extensive, haven't see one like this for any of the previous versions of the product.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Work with schemas, maps, and pipelines, and create flat file schemas.
• Configure a new FTP, HTTP and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) adapter for BizTalk Server
• Use BizTalk Orchestration Designer to create and test a simple orchestration.
• Configure orchestration properties and variables, deploy an orchestration, and create and deploy a rule set and execute those rules from within an orchestration.
• Define, deploy, and map a BAM observation model.
• Use the deployment and management features in BizTalk Server
• Build a simple Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service and client and configure BizTalk Server to use a WCF Adapter.
• Create a Microsoft .NET class library project that will contain a WCF Adapter.
• Deploy artifacts needed for processing certain EDI documents and for turning XML messages into EDI.

Nandri!

Saravana

We are in the process of migrating some of our existing stuff from BizTalk 2006 to BizTalk 2010. As part of the process I was prototyping a web service call with some complex data models using WCF-basicHttp adapter.

I was consistently getting the following error message despite my various attempts like restarting host instances, redeploying the whole solution, uninstalling and installing assembly into GAC, etc

xlang/s engine event log entry: Uncaught exception (see the 'inner exception' below) has suspended an instance of service

......

Exception type: TargetInvocationException

Source: mscorlib

Target Site: System.Object _InvokeMethodFast(System.IRuntimeMethodInfo, System.Object, System.Object[], System.SignatureStruct ByRef, System.Reflection.MethodAttributes, System.RuntimeType)

The following is a stack trace that identifies the location where the exception occured

......

Exception type: TypeInitializationException

Source: EA.BizTalk.Framework.WCF.Orchestrations

Target Site: Microsoft.XLANGs.BaseTypes.SchemaBase get_PartSchema()

The following is a stack trace that identifies the location where the exception occured

......

Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131401)

......

Exception type: FileLoadException

Source: EA.BizTalk.Framework.WCF.Orchestrations

Target Site: Void .cctor()

Doing some research taken me to this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2282372 where it explains about the error Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances. Even though the KB article is not related to BizTalk issue directly, it just gave me the clue its something do with 64bit process and version of .NET framework.

I checked the settings of the default BizTalk host configuration and to my surprise its configured as 32 bit as shown in the below picture.

Surprisingly, when I tried to create a new BizTalk host, by default the "32-bit only" option is checked by default.

Solution:

So, the solution is to create a new 64 bit host (simply, uncheck the 32bit only option) and create required host instances, then configure your orchestration to run inside the newly created 64 bit host as shown below.

Once the orchestration issue is sorted, you'll experience something similar on the WCF-basicHttp adapter send port as shown in the below figure.

There was a failure executing the response(receive) pipeline: "Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.XMLReceive, Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Source: "XML disassembler" Send Port: "WcfSendPort_CustomerService_BasicHttpBinding_ICustomerService" URI: "http://localhost:7684/CustomerService.svc" Reason: Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131401)

The solution to the problem is same, this time you need to create new Send handlers for the WCF adapter you are using and reconfigure your send port to use the new send handler as shown in below pictures