The Biztalk core engine team have a great blogg here, be sure to check it out, Lee has kicked it off with a great blogg on zombies. Back in the days of BTS2000 Lee and I shared an office, but after six months we had to move into our own offices, there just wasn’t enough room to fit myself, Lee and his 15 million empty/half drunk pop cans :-). They’re a solid bunch so I’m looking forward to plenty more great bloggs.
Be sure to check out Kevin Smith’s (kevinsmi) blog which appears to have just come out. He’s an ok chap, although I think he misspelled my last name on purpose (since we shared an office for a year you’d think he’d know how to spell it). Hopefully this weekend I’ll put together another good little paper on some topic of interest.
Ok, so who the heck is this Kevin B Smith chap? Well, until recently I spent the bulk of my Microsoft career in Redmond working for the Biztalk Server product group where I shipped the Biztalk Server 2000, 2002 and 2004 releases. I spent all of that time working as a dev in the core engine team and for the 2004 release I had a huge amount of fun as the Technical Lead SDE for the messaging engine. In previous verisons I worked on the many areas within the messaging engine, did work on pretty much all of the adapters that we shipped, and worked on Biztalk Framework (BTF). After shipping BTS 2004 I moved back to the UK where I now work for Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) out of the Developer practice, so now I get to spend the bulk of my time helping customers to architect and build high end enterprise solutions using Biztalk Server…you might say that’s full product cycle!!
Since I spent so so much time designing and building the messaging engine which is essentially the platform on which adapters run I thought it would be a good idea to share some of that information around how adapters work and how they should be built to get the most out of the engine. With that in mind I recently completed an adpater white paper / PAG which can be found here: Adapters: A Developer’s Guide I hope you find it an interesting and useful read.
Kevin.