And so for my final report from the MVP summit. For the BizTalk MVPs, day four started with a Q&A session with product team members. A number of issues were discussed centred on the recurrent themes of evolving a coherent strategy across the Connected Services Division and the more effective inclusion of the MVP community into the feedback loop. From my perspective, the BizTalk MVPs must surely be a valuable, if rather under-utilised, resource for CSD. The collective wisdom and experience bought together in the Adams room in building 43 over the last couple of days represents decades of person-year experience in applying a central CSD product to the real-life needs of Microsoft’s customers around the globe. Listening to the MVPs in discussions over coffee or in the evenings, there was a common set of fears, complaints, wishes and hopes, and, as Jon Fancy was saying in the airport at the end of the day, we should have far more practical, ongoing, input into the product team in order to reflect the real world back to those responsible for our favourite integration toolkit.
The first session of the day was an introduction by Tony Barnard into the new EDI support in BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Microsoft has recognised the need to provide a much better out-of-the-box story for EDI, and R2 provides support and tooling for over 8000 schemas. Microsoft will continue to partner with other organisations to build, for example, robust HIPAA (US health system electronic data interchange) support, and is looking at its options with regard to managing schema updates over time.
Steve Maine led the next session looking at web development enhancements in ’Orcas’ and WCF. Specifically, he discussed and demonstrated new support for partial trust, RESTful development, a unified model for both SOAP and POX, a data model for RSS, and AJAX/JSON support.
The general WCF theme continued with a Shy Cohen demonstrating Orcas improvements for developing and testing WCF server and client applications. He demonstrated a new metadata-driven client test harness and the ’autohost’ features for testing server-side code. WCF development should be a lot easier in the future.
There was one more session, but NDA means that I cannot discuss. Sorry. Suffice to say that we have a lot of exciting stuff to look forward to from CSD in the future.
And that was that. By now, the lack of sleep, jet lag and constant activity of the last few days was beginning to take its toll, and I was glad to enjoy a leisurely lunch and then make my way back to the airport and an early-evening flight back to the UK. I can never sleep on planes (not in economy, anyway), so by Friday afternoon , back in the UK, I was shattered. 12 hours sleep later, I feel a little more human. The MVP tee-shirt has gone to my eldest daughter. The CSD Soduku game has gone to my second eldest (I already had one, anyway). Other tat has been duly distributed around the family, and I plan to spend a quiet weekend catching up with my life and remembering an excellent conference and many new faces. My thanks to Microsoft for organising a great event.