BizTalk Server is finally engaging the open source community – What we can do now.

BizTalk Server is finally engaging the open source community – What we can do now.

3 days ago Microsoft started sharing the BizTalk Server stack source code in GitHub.

This is an historical decision for me, more than two years ago I started fighting to make this happen and I am very happy for this Microsoft decision.

I strongly believe in the source code approach from the big companies and for many reasons but let have a look what we can really do now.

How to start?

The source code is under Contributor License Agreement (CLA), to start contributing you need to sign the license agreement here https://cla.microsoft.com.
You need to sign the document using DocSign and you will be able to access to the repo.

The Git repo is in GitHub at this address

https://github.com/Microsoft/Integration/tree/master/BizTalk%20Server

What we can do?

Microsoft started shared some main areas, let have a look what we can really do for each of them.

Adapter

This is a very critical area, we know about some many issue around them, one for example is the famous zero file adapter in the BizTalk File adapter.
We can extend the adapters with new capabilities and these will be immediately available to the product.

We can fix all known issues, the difference now is that, we have a development collaboration portal to work together.

Pipeline

We can extend pipeline capabilities and new components, very interesting will be the possibility to create a repo with an extensive catalogue of components.

Schemas

We can add the documentation to may important schemas and we can extend all the EDI stack with many new EDI formats.

Tools

Many people know how much I’m care about tools and productivity, this area is critical.

Years ago I develop a tool named BizTalk NOS Addin which was able to improve the BizTalk development productivity about the 1000%.
We can add a lot of new tools here.

We are full of tools that we normally use every day, we just only need to put them in the repo and working all together in the refactoring.

I’d like to see the development tool area (Visual Studio), I hope it will be included in the Tools area.

Sample

How many time we reuse the same code and template for any new project, this is the area to put this our amazing stuff.

What I’d like to see more

I’m working in BizTalk since the 2000 version and I see 3 main areas in BizTalk where we can work and able to give an amazing contribution to the product.

  1. Development

    1. Think about the possibility to extend the Visual Studio development capabilities with, searching, automation test and development, fix many well-known issue, improving the
      Visual Studio UI integrating new capabilities in the designer.
      Improve migration, we can extend a lot the migration capabilities into Azure, extend orchestration capabilities, extend the pipeline development capabilities and testing, integrate PowerShell in the UI and more.
      This are is the most critical in order to provide the maximum value to the product.
  2. Admin Console

    1. We can do so much here, improving the console for monitoring, management, searching, integrating PowerShell in the UI, we are full of amazing PowerShell scripts able to provide many interesting features to the admin UI.
      Alerting, advisory, auditing, integration with other stack like Visual studio and more.
  3. Migration

I am sure we will be able to do a lot for the product now.