Microsoft has just released a new version(1.1) of the BizTalk Best Practices Analyzer (BPA). For those of you not familiar with it, it's an awesome tool that looks at your infrastructure, compares it to rules gathered from a variety of experts, and issues a report with recommendations. It does not actually change anything, it just scans the environment and spots opportunities for improvement, provides an explanation and a link to further documentation for anything it reports on. To give you an idea of scope-of-change, version 1.0 had 77 rules, version 1.1 has 220. This is an EXTREMELY important tool. BizTalk solutions typically span a wide swath of the Microsoft technology stack, and mis-configurations outside of BizTalk (eg: IIS, file system, database, etc) can have a big impact on the performance of a BizTalk solution. The BPA looks across the stack, and identifies potential problem areas.
Download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDA047E3-408E-48BA-83F9-F397226CD6D4&displaylang=en
Along the same lines, I blogged recently about the new BizTalk operations guide which is an invaluable reference source. If you have not looked at it yet, you should do so, it's well worth your time. See that post here: http://geekswithblogs.net/bloesgen/archive/2008/02/21/119857.aspx.
The following are some screen shots from the Best Practices Analyzer at work:
Doing a scan:
List report:
Drilling into an issue and asking for an explanation (this is in one of my VMs, no cause for alarm :)):
