BizTalk Server Extensibility (e)Book

A new BizTalk Server eBook is available for the 2013 R2 version with the focus on extensibility.

Together with Johann Cooper and Eldert Grootenboer I have written on various aspects of extensibility with BizTalk Server. The .NET framework adds tremendous value in extending BizTalk Server solutions to create more versatile, robust solutions. We discuss the extensibility for BizTalk Server from a holistic view around the following topics:

- Ports
- Orchestrations
- BRE
- BAM
- Deployment
- Operations
- Tooling


The eBook is available through the BizTalk360 website.

The journey started after my first webcast BizTalk Extensibility for the Integration Monday a year ago in February 2015. At first I did not have any plans to pursue anything after that talk. However, a few months later I got in touch with Johann Cooper, who I interviewed for my blog and met in person in 2014 during my visit to Australia.

We discussed opportunities of writing a book for a well-known publisher. Unfortunately a deal never materialized and we started to think about other options. Our initial thought was to create a white paper on BizTalk Server Extensibility as this didn’t have the attention we though it should have. We felt the .NET framework empowers BizTalk Server in a very valuable way, if applied with thought.

Johann and I started writing the paper at the end of September 2015. And soon it turned out that we had many topics around extensibility and predicted that the amount of material would validate making an eBook out of it rather than a paper.

Our prediction was right. After a few months we had close to 100 pages, yet some topics still required attention. Therefore, we involved Eldert as an extra co-author to end of the book in time with his expertise on some of the topics like BAM and the BTDF. His help and our motivation helped us to finish what we started in September.

We were not alone in this, as Sandro Pereira, Mark Brimble and James Corbould put in numerous hours to review our eBook. These guys are superb reviewers and helped us a great deal to evolve the eBook to a very valuable resource for you as readers to benefit from. Therefore, Sandro, Mark and James, thank you so much for your efforts and support!

I also like to extend my gratitude to BizTalk360 and Saravana Kumar, who has publish the eBook through his site. Saravana is a great support towards the BizTalk community, thank you my dear friend.

Working on this eBook demanded a lot of time for us and it was worth every second of it. I enjoyed working on it and collaborating with both co-authors and like to thank both Johann and Eldert for realizing this eBook. A year ago I never thought this end result was in the making.

Enjoy reading it,

Steef-Jan

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