My new project!

I know I’ve been very quiet on the blog front which is the opposite of work at the moment; there are loads of things going on from BizTalk Server 2006, WCF, Workflow to Team System which is nearing its release in March! That combined with the last minute fit and finish of the book I’ve contributed to along with a new project that I’ve just signed up to do….

I’ve been long resisting the urge to write a BizTalk book and I’ve finally given in, I’ve signed the contract with Wiley to write Professional BizTalk Server 2006. There’s been a huge hole in the BizTalk book space which was partially filled by BizTalk Unleashed by Scott Woodgate and his team but from my work with customers there’s been the increasing need for a “real world” BizTalk book covering BizTalk in detail under the covers along with real-life advice and guidance from Consultants who’ve “been there” and “done that” .

The final push to write the book was a customer in a recent meeting asking “Why does it take Darren or Kevin to come and tell us these things”, why aren’t they in the documentation, why isn’t this experience and guidance documented more openly? Without this we’d find it really hard to deliver this project” – Those weren’t the exact words but you get the idea – there’s only so much we can put in the documentation and a lot of the “goodness” we preach is based on experience.

So that’s what the book is going to cover, they’ll be the usual in-depth overview of the BizTalk 2006 release from a developers point of view including the new features, along with loads of advice and guidance covering the things you need to do to stand any success with delivering a BizTalk Server based solution – the big stand out topics for me are going to Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) which will show just how powerful BAM is and how it should be present in all BizTalk solutions, Testing which will cover how you can unit and system test your entire BizTalk solution which again should be present in all BizTalk solutions but sadly isn’t and last but not least deep coverage of Performance and Scalability an oft overlooked and admittedly black art to get right.

It won’t be a introduction book, if you’re after this then get a copy of BizTalk Unleashed. I’ll be covering the BizTalk Architecture early on but I’m really aiming at the intermediate to advance developer.

I’ll look to publish a ToC soon to whet your appetite and I’ve love to hear any suggestions you may have for a book in this space! More news on this soon. As for release, it’s going to be the end of the year I’d have at a guess – Sorry! J