Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

Foreword

Mission-critical enterprise integration applications are among the most challenging, valuable, and rewarding applications to build and deliver. Since you've picked up and are thumbing through a book on BizTalk Server, I'm guessing you know this as well, probably from firsthand experience. Looking back, I've spent the better part of the last 15 years building both applications, as well as platform and server products in this space. For the last six years I've had the privilege of being part of the BizTalk Server development team — first as a group program manager and later as a product unit manager for the core BizTalk Server team. During this time I've seen many fads and trends come and go, and while some of them brought useful advances that helped address key issues, there is still no substitute for the kind of real-world, best-practices type of advice that the authors have included in this book.

The focus in recent years on Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), and Web services are really the culmination of the types of systems and the architectural and operational constraints that integration developers have been working to address for a long time. Today, BizTalk Server has more customers than any other product in the BPM, SOI space — a great testament to the value we've delivered to enterprise customers, as well as the skills and talents of the many thousands of BizTalk application developers around the world. Our philosophy of maintaining an open dialog with our ...