If you are interested in finding out more about Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) then you should check out the upcoming week of webcasts.  See Paul's Blog for more details. 

So, with the big announcement about the upcoming release of Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF - gotta love that acronym; I was surprised not to see Hulk Hogan here presenting), many BizTalk developers have already started asking what this means for BizTalk Server. 

The simple answer is that BizTalk 2008 (or whatever the official name becomes, but not 2006) will host the workflow runtime for its orchestration capabilities and will extend workflow with all of the great things you've come to expect from BizTalk.  BizTalk Server will be your enterprise solution for scalable, reliable message based integration, business process management and SOA applications and services.  BizTalk will be providing MANY important features on top of the basic workflow foundation that you will want for your EAI, B2B, and SOA apps, like pipelines, adapters, management, infrastructure, security, etc.  So, before you run off and say, "With WCF ("Indigo") and WWF, I can build my own BizTalk"; think twice, or maybe five times.  The BizTalk team has years of experience and customer data points for building the manageability, scalability and reliability that an application of this type demands and they will continue to deliver a product that goes far beyond the capabilities of the WWF. 

However, the great news is, skill sets in WWF, which will likely reach more developers, will be greatly applicable to BizTalk Server 2008 development.  And, because the workflow foundation is extensible, it is likely that BizTalk developers will get their biggest wishes answered in two ways.  1) BizTalk Server 2008 will almost definitely include VS.Net debugging for orchestrations as this is already built into WWF. 2) BizTalk 2008 will easily have the ability to allow developers to create and use custom actions, and we'll have to watch for the product team to include. 

All that being said, and my passion for BizTalk being obvious, WWF is hugely powerful framework on its own and will allow developers to create amazing applications while improving their productivity.  The activity model will also help in the ever present goal of making reusable components.  So, I'm very excited about WWF, and glad we can now talk about it publicly.  Look for more information here on my blog and the Pluralsight web site for upcoming announcements related to WWF, WCF and BizTalk. 

So my lame excuse for not blogging for months is that I have been traveling all over the world.  That's not entirely true, and I've certainly had time in the office, I've just been finding a lot to do.  So, here is the run down of what I have been doing, and more importantly, what I plan on doing and blogging about in the next couple of weeks.

So first off, I went to Shanghai, China to deliver the Applied Web Services class for a group of Microsoft folks there.  It was a great bunch of people with varying reasons for being interested in web services.  The trip was fabulous and it was a great experience for me, having never been to China.  Sorry, I don't have any pictures yet, as that is another thing I haven't gotten around to: taking my disposable camera in for development. 

So that was my excuse for June, that and Tech Ed, but then I had to get ready for RAGBRAI, the great bicycle ride across Iowa. My in-laws have been doing the ride for years, and having grown up in Iowa, I had always wanted to try it so this was the year.  485 miles was tough on some days, but I made it through and even made it up the big hills without having to get off and walk.  If I do it again next year, I'll be sure to train a little harder for those hills.  We had a lot of fun and took my 1 year old son along.  The first night we camped with him in a tent and had 70 MPH winds and downpour of rain.  He slept through some of the loudest thunder claps, and only woke up and got upset in the morning when he realized he was soaking wet.  He's a trooper!  

So what's coming up: 

PDC - I'll be there, just doing the attendee thing this time and excited to learn about Office 12 and workflow.  I'll probably check out an Indigo talk or two as well.  :) 

HDC - The heartland developer conference is Oct 12 - 14 and will be a lot of fun.  If you are in the central region you should check it out.  I'm presenting on XML in SQL Server and I'll be looking at the server side as well as programming the client side. 

I've got an article coming out in MSDN magazine on Visual Studio Templates and Starter Kits.  When I have a definite date, I'll pass it along.  For us trainer types, these are very cool as they allow us to reuse initial solutions over and over.  The article, however, is geared toward business/enterprise developers who want to leverage templates for projects and items to have some consistency in their organization.  These are very cool stuff and hopefully the article will help you get started with them. 

Now, for blogging, I have lots to write about, including BizTalk pipeline configuration and dynamic message part creation in orchestrations and pipelines.  I've also done some fiddling with BizTalk web services for a project I'm working on and hope to share some insights on how to tweak those generated services when you need/want to.  In addition, I'll be posting on some of the new features in BizTalk 2006 that I really like around web services, pipelines and orchestrations.