With BizTalk 2009 now ready for release it's a good time to comment on some of MicroLink's work with the current platform. We (MicroLink) have utilized BizTalk in development efforts in a variety of fashions. We were submitted ourselves for the BTS 2009 TAP in hopes of using the latest code base in one of our internal development initiatives and soon found a customer driven solution to apply the platform to. Our main feature interests for the TAP were the Hyper-V virtualization and SQL 2008 support which both preformed as advertised. Being a Visual Studio/TFS 2008 shop we were obviously pleased to see the updated IDE support (I'd personally like to see IDS support released in conjunction with Visual Studio) .

Our applications used a variety of orchestrations, pipelines and bits of custom code. Overall the testing went quite well. We successfully migrated one of our BTS 2006 codebases and had it up and running on our new environment in no time. Performance of the current release was on par with 2006 even on a system with reduced specs. We did not do much in the way of volume testing so I will lean on the experience of others before I comment on that.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Richard Hughes and Emil Velinov who were our TAP liaisons within Microsoft. After utilizing the platform in the TAP we are actively incorporating the 2009 platform in our future technology roadmap.