BizTalk 2009 RTM New Features Overview

I was asked to write a piece on technology for the Avanade internal monthly newsletter today. It gave me the perfect opportunity to highlight some of the new features of the freshly released BizTalk 2009 RTM and so I thought I'd share this overview here as well:

BizTalk 2009 - previously pegged as BizTalk 2006 R3 – follows in the evolutionary release stead of BizTalk 2006 R2 by offering key improvements in the feature set and functionality, without making any groundbreaking changes to the core of the product itself. There are new Oracle and SQL adapters and BAM interceptors; updated platform support including Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V virtualization and SQL Server 2008; multi-site clustering; UDDI 3.0 and more, but in the interests of keeping you all from glazing over, I’ll focus specifically on how developing solutions with BizTalk has changed in the new version.

First, however, I’d like to propose a moment of silent contemplation in respect for our dear departed friend, HAT. Like a well worn pair of comfortable slippers, HAT has finally been retired (though actually the executable file is still installed) and its functionality consolidated into the BizTalk Administration Console. This welcome change means all of our message management is now in one place.

BizTalk 2009 now supports .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and development is done in Visual Studio 2008. We’ve all been working with these products for a while now so it’s great to be able to leverage the functionality they offer when developing solutions with BizTalk. BizTalk 2009 also sports Team Foundation Server integration, with all the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management that it brings.

BizTalk 2009 project files are now in MSBuild format, falling into line with other .NET language projects like C#, which allows for straightforward automated builds through TFS and, notably, means that Visual Studio is no longer required to compile BizTalk solutions.

It is now (at last!) possible to step through a map’s XSLT, functoids and custom scripts with the new ‘Debug Map’ option in Visual Studio 2008. This includes multi-input maps. As you step through the map, the input and output documents are opened automatically and the output is populated on-the-fly as you step though. This should massively reduce the time taken to troubleshoot mapping issues.

Support for unit testing with Visual Studio Test has been added and covers maps, schemas and pipelines.

Properties for BizTalk artifacts are now all available from the standard Visual Studio property grid. No more custom dialogs for setting input instances and other BizTalk specific settings. The ‘Development’ and ‘Deployment’ project configurations have been replaced with the more standard ‘Debug’ and ‘Release’ and BizTalk projects can now contain compilable non-BizTalk items such as C# classes. However, this must be done using ‘Add existing item…’.

So there are some great improvements in this release. The changes on the development side will allow us to turn around solutions faster and more consistently and those on the software infrastructure side will facilitate greater robustness and scalability. There are a few things which I would like to have seen such as the ability to create a multi-input map outside of an orchestration, the ability to resize the expression window in the orchestration designer and support for automated deployment leveraging the TFS/MSBuild integration, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for these.