Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed – Book Review

Published on : Oct 4, 2011

Category : BizTalk Server

Saravana

Author

“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.