public void JorgenNilsson()

The ESB Toolkit 2.0 (former ESB Guidance) is finally available for download. You find it here.

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 provides architectural guidance, patterns and practices, and a collection of BizTalk Server and .NET Framework components to simplify the development of enterprise-scale solutions on the Microsoft platform. The toolkit also provides capabilities to help developers extend existing messaging and integration solutions. The BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 consists of a collection of interoperating components that support and implement a loosely coupled messaging environment. This environment simplifies the process of building dynamic message-based enterprise applications.

Here are some powerpoint presentations from sessions at TechEd 2009 and TechReady 7.

TechEd 2009 - BizTalk Server Presentations

TechReady 7 - BizTalk Customer Advisory Team Presentations

Finally the WM 6.5 developer toolkit is here. It includes Emulator images, Gesture API’s and samples. Its like Carlsberg - “Worth waiting for” :)

Here is a great document that describes how to implement high availability for BizTalk Server components and dependencies using Windows Server Clustering technology. How to improve Fault Tolerance in BizTalk Server by Using a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster or Windows Server 2003 server cluster.

Here are some videos demonstrating how to use the WCF support in BizTalk.

This Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) video demonstrates using the BizTalk WCF Service Publishing Wizard.

This Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) video demonstrates using the BizTalk WCF Service Consuming Wizard.

This Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) video examines how to configure a BizTalk receive location using the WCF-Custom adapter.

The BizTalk Server 2009 Hyper-V Guide is finally here. It provides information for using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

I found a good article about the strategy when setting up a DTAP (Development, Test, Acceptance and Production) environment. It’s posted by Steef-Jan Wiggers and you can find it here.

Today, after more than two weeks of vacation I run into a totally new error when trying to compile any BizTalk project. The error message was:

Build failed. Compiler for file type '*.xsd' failed. Value cannot be null. Parameter name: pUnk

Huh!??! Punk!??! What the F*** does that mean!??!
I googled on the message and didn't find much so I guess it's not a very common problem. But I found this old article KB 884412.

I'm still not sure what caused the problem but I did a repair on the BizTalk installation and the problem was gone. Hmm Maybe BizTalk had a christmas vacation too :)