Marcus Rosen.NET

I have for the last couple of days been playing with K2.NET, which is an excellent product for playing the human workflow part in a BizTalk implemention, rather the awful Human Workflow Services.... :-(

As I was trying a couple of different things, I got to a stage were I wanted to delete some of my existing deployed (K2 uses the word "exported") processes, but I could not for the life of me work out how to do it. It's not in the HELP file, not in the study notes, etc..

Finally I found this post on the K2.NET Forums that discussses the wProcDelete stored procedure in the K2 transaction database...

It isn't a very pretty, intuitive or even user-friendly solution but it does work....

Tried for the 1st time to install BizTalk 2006 myself today on a Virtual PC Image, but had problems downloading and finding the pre-requisite redistributable files (BtsRedist.cab) required for the install.

Thanks to Grant Holliday of Readify it all worked out, see his post here:
http://www.holliday.com.au/blog/biztalk-2006-pre-requisite-cab-files.html

The BizTalk Product team has released the product documentation in PDF format (> 8000 Pages)!! The package contains the following PDF files:

• Getting Started (506 pages)
• Planning and Architecture (1,056 pages)
• Security and Protection (60 pages)
• Development (2,098 pages)
• Deployment (149 pages)
• Operations (1,950 pages)
• Business Process Management (703 pages)
• Troubleshooting (133 pages)
• Technical Reference (2,100 pages)

See Luke Nyswonger's Post for more information:
http://blogs.msdn.com/luke/archive/2006/04/19/579289.aspx

Or download directly here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8F3EC693-2865-4B85-8455-745511EA4267&displaylang=en

New Features of BizTalk Server 2006

Kris Horrocks introduces some of the new features of BizTalk Server 2006. See demos of the all new BizTalk Administration Console and Group Hub Page, as well as technical demonstrations of new core engine features like recoverable interchanges and end-to-end ordered message delivery.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060309BizTalkKH/manifest.xml

Microsoft has released a whole heap web casts for SQL Server 2005:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/eval/webcast.mspx?wt.mc_id=SQL.AD.01072

Are you programming in VB.NET 2.0?

Are you missing the refactoring function that C# 2.0 offers in Visual Studio 2005?

I know that I was really looking forward to this function when finally moving to VS2005 and was very disappointed when the VS development team was forced to remove it from the first realease of VS 2005 due to time constraints.

WELL, Developer Express Inc has now released a free add-on for VB.NET 2.0 that should offer similar functionality to the C# one.

Get it from here today:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/tools/refactor/

After about a month’s preparation I finally sat and passed the 074-135 (Developing E-Business Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004) with a final exam score of 887 (pass is 700). It's a hard exam in that the preparation required is quite extensive. As with any MS partner exams there are no practice exams (e.g. Trancenders) available and all you have to go on is the study guide. If you intend to sit this exam, I highly recommend lots of PRACTICAL knowledge regarding the platform (as I actually doing versus only reading about it).

These are the source that I used:

BizTalk 2004 Server Unleashed
BizTalk 2004 Whitepapers
Microsoft MSDN Articles
MOC 2157 – Development
MOC 2158 - Administrator
All SDK samples (Refresh)

I do believe in this case the study guide matched pretty well what the exam did cover.

Now I only have the BizTalk 2006 exam to look forward to, which is yet to be released. ;-)