This past week, I had the joy of helping out a Client with BizTalk 2002. Wow, I haven’t said this in a while! I decided to jump in my time machine and do an install….Windows 2000 with Visual Studio 6.0 and BizTalk 2002. I was surprised that I got this working in a short amount of time with no errors! I fired up the infinite amount of user interfaces for the product and began waking up some of my dormant brain cells pertaining to 2002.
So when you look back at the product, is it really that much different? You have an editor, a mapper, an orchestration designer…wait, disregard my last sentence. All I can say about the 2002 orchestration designer is…Yuck. I then was overjoyed to bring up the Messaging Manager and navigate my way through the Channels and Ports…boy, this was a confusing product, but I will admit that we did get it to work!!! All I can say is Thank God for BizTalk 2006! What a difference in just a few years. I just love looking at old VB 6.0 code….On Error Resume Next and fall through and not catch an error and wonder why it doesn’t work and blame it on BizTalk!
I was able to help out our Client and get them moving in the right direction. They had some interesting issues, but didn’t know where to look to resolve these issues. I’ll make a statement here and I don’t think I’m going to shock anyone:
A MAJORITY OF BIZTALK ISSUES THAT I COME ACROSS ARE NOT RELATED TO BIZTALK AT ALL, BUT RATHER EDUCATION ON THE PRODUCT AND IT’S CAPABILITIES.
Installing BizTalk does not mean that you automatically have a good design in place and are free from bad coding. Do you agree?