BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook: Review

June 7, 2012 2 Comments

Recently I had a chance to review BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook by Steef-Jan. I really enjoyed reading the book.  I must say,It is well written and covers most of the important areas of BizTalk Server. The Book is equally interesting for Developers/Architects and Administrators.

In my opinion writing a technical book requires a lot of hard work and passion about the techonology, Steef-Jan has done a great job.

Structure

I really like the way the book is organised and my favourite is “There’s more” section. That is the thing which makes the book different. The structure is very nice and basic as:

  • Subject/problem – we first read about a topic or a problem/requirement
  • Getting ready       – then we see how we should get ready for the solution
  • How to do it         – then we see how to resolve the problem
  • How it works       – then we understand the solution
  • There’s more        – and yes there are more things related to our subject/problem/solution etc.
  • See also                 – this gives more information about the topic.

Chapters

  • Chapter 1– You will learn some of the most important things about starting/setting a BizTalk project & environment. Some of them are like
    • Requirement Gathering
    • Creating a solution Design
    • Tools to benchmark BizTalk Server Installation
    • Performance Analysis Tool (PAL)
    • SSO/MSDTC etc
  • Chapter 2– You will learn Patterns in this chapter, standard ways for designing BizTalk solutions. It is Well written with great examples.
  • Chapter 3– This is my favourite, You will learn about instrumentation/logging/tracing/error handling and in-depth about solution deployments.
  • Chapter 4–  You will learn about security and message encryption here. I really enjoyed reading this, it was very much useful for me.
  • Chapter 5–  The BizTalk and all about WCF. the examples are great and the subject is very clear.
  • Chapter 6–  All about BizTalk and AppFabric at one place. This was new for me, So I really enjoyed reading this chapter.
  • Chapter 7–  Very important one and well explained about BizTalk Server monitoring. This is very useful for the BizTalk administrators.
  • Chapter 8–  You will learn about BizTalk and the use of Business Rule Engine in BizTalk Solutions.
  • Chapter 9–  This is again very useful chapter dedicated for testing BizTalk solutions. MapTest framework and BizMock were new for me. I really enjoyed the examples, they were great!

My Conclusion

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is working/interested or planing to work with BizTalk Server. This book is highly recommended for Developers as well as Administrators and Architects.

There is more

BizTalk Server community is  great! There is already some great review comments available about the Book, See the below list( there is no particular order). I would really recommend you to read them.

Thanks for reading 🙂

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