The last day I was participating in discussion with BPI User Education team. It was really good to hear that people are listening to the complains and are improving the documentation. Also, we have discussed other possibilities to improve the user experience in order to make it easier to find the necessary resources and learn. Not everything went smoothly this day. It appeared that the lady at the checkin mixed the return tickets of me and my collegue, so I had to go to the hotel early.

First day, the registration and Microsoft expo, where MVP’s could talk with the people from Microsoft about things like MSN, codezone, etc. The next day contained general sessions for Windows Server System, Visual development and the other. This time I decided to go to the Visual Development sessions instead of taking Windows Server System track. The general track was of three parts: Soma talked about Visual Studio .Net 2005 and a little bit of insight into the future versions.

First the flight: 2 hours Vilnius - Amsterdam and after that 9 hours Amsterdam - Seattle. I was very tired after the flight and had a strong headache. Customs: They were asking serious and fun questions like: Do You have a business card? Where do You go? What is MVP? Is this a conference or seminar? (Hmmm … neither, it’s a summit) The interesting part was when I passed by the last checkpoint where the customs people were checking if anyone brings something like insects, reptiles, etc.

Today I’ve been playing with BizTalk 2006 remote scenarios and of course ran into MSDTC configuration issues. I have BizTalk administration utilities installed on my PC, and BizTalk with the SQL Server was running on the Virtual Server. When I was trying to expand applications container (on the client machine) I was getting message like: “Error during policies enumeration. Check if your MSDTC settings for remote network clients are set up properly.

Check out Atlas … In general, it is not new (remmember AJAX?), but looks nice. With Atlas You can easily call web services (withoug posting back page itself), implement databinding, have a nice dynamic controls.

MSDN site opens part dedicated for the WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation). There You can get some bits, read about relation to the other workflow related products (like BizTalk). Isn’t it too much stuff for one PDC? I mean Atlas, WWF and the rest of the stuff.

You can find some sneak preview here. Nice name . Everything is called now with the “foundation”, like presentation Foundation (Avalon). It looks like that BizTalk will have use this foundation. Just think about: Currently BizTalk is all about messages and persistance. What about scenarios where persistance is not required, or application business workflows (usually hosted in-memory)? I think WWF should provide solid “foundation” for all these scenarios.

Recently there was a discussion between me and business system owners in the company. We were discussing about integrating various platforms and technologies using BizTalk. The initial question that started the discussion was pretty simple: does BizTalk supports CORBA, SNMP, Telnet and TL1. As You may guess, all this is for telecommunication services. You can easy find an adapter for CORBA from http://www.iwaysoftware.com/, there are no adapters for other protocols though (or at least I didn’t found them through MSN Search).

Good article on building IBF solution: http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/IBFWalkthroughPart1.asp http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/IBFWalkthroughPart2.asp Why I liked it? Because of simplicity and clarity and because it is hard to start with info from MS.

[BizTalk naming conventions](http://www.traceofthought.net/misc/BizTalk Naming Conventions.htm) via Scott Colestock