Notes From The Road: 2013 in Review

2013 was a defining year for me. It was a year of travel, community growth, and deeper connections within the BizTalkCrew. Looking back, the sheer scale of what we achieved as a community is a testament to the passion surrounding Microsoft Integration.

BizTalk Innovation Days are more active…

One of the best things is that BizTalkCrew (me, Nino Crudele, Tord Glad Nordahl, Saravana Kumar, and Steef-Jan Wiggers) became even closer and more active, and the result was 4 major BizTalk events in Europe:

• BizTalk Summit 2013, London (Jan 2013).
• Oporto BizTalk Innovation Day, Portugal (Mar 2013).
• Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Days 2013, Norway (Sep 2013).
• BizTalk Innovation Day Italy 2013, Italy (Oct 2013).

And for me, it was a great honor for the first time to realize this event in Portugal.

Also, this year we have the opportunity and the pleasure to invite Microsoft Integration MVPs, the strongest specialist and the Microsoft Product Team to join us in these types of events, like: Kent Weare, Salvatore Pellitteri, Charles Young, Jon Fancey, Michael Stephenson, Guru Venkataraman, Kent Brown, Paolo Salvatori, Akshat Sharma, and Sam Vanhoutte.

My Blog is growing…

Very special thanks to all my reader I really appreciate the 200,000 visits to my blog, from 176 countries in the past year. In 2012, the visits to my blog have grown 87% (from 91,000 to 170,000), the upward trend continued… this time by 17%, so once again, thank you for following my blog.

In 2013, there were 79 new posts (20 fewer than the previous year) with a total of 855 pictures uploaded, growing the total archive of this blog to 350 posts. The busiest day of the year was October 24th with 1,148 views. The most popular post that day was BizTalk 2013 Installation and Configuration – Installing BizTalk Adapter Pack (Part 12).

The posts that got the most views in 2013 were:

1. “Cannot open database ‘…’ requested by the login. The login failed” or “The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘…’, database ‘…’, schema ‘dbo’” posted in February 2012 (for the second year on top).
2.  How To import Add Reference from the WSDL file posted in June 2009
3. The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. Inaccessible logs: Security. posted in February 2012.
4. BizTalk 2013 Installation and Configuration – Important considerations before set up the server (Part 1) posted in May 2013.
5. BizTalk 2010 Installation and Configuration – Installing and Configuring BizTalk Server (Part 8) was posted in October 2010.

However, my favorite posts that I enjoyed writing last year were:

• The continuation of BizTalk Mapper Patterns series: BizTalk Mapper Patterns: Automatically Link The Record Elements By Structure, Name or Using Mass Copy – Because I’m writing an eBook about this topic.
• BizTalk 2013 Installation and Configuration post series (part 1 to part 15) – 15 posts describing all the steps to install and configure a Developer BizTalk Server 2013 Standalone machine.
• Or my posts about Windows Azure BizTalk Services (at the time it was Windows Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI Labs – April 2012 release): Understanding Content-Based Routing in EAI Bridges, Using EDI Bridge to exchange B2B messages in Windows Azure Service Bus, and Using EAI Bridges and LOB Target to connect to on-premises SQL Server.

The most commented on post in 2013 was BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter 4.0, which is fully compatible with BizTalk Server 2013.

TechNet Wiki

Last year, I wrote a total of 20 wiki articles for Microsoft TechNet Wiki and edited an enormous amount of existing articles. These are my favorites:

• List of Service Packs and Cumulative Updates available for BizTalk Server – This article lists all the available service packs and the cumulative updates for Microsoft BizTalk Server and for Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack.
• BizTalk Server: Glossary – This article contains an alphabetized list of the most common terms used in BizTalk Server.
• BizTalk Server Best Practices: Create and Configure BizTalk Server Host and Host Instances – One of the tasks that we need to do in all our new BizTalk environments over and over again is creating and configuring the Host, Host Instances, and, of course, the adapter handlers. This article will provide you with some of the Best Practices.
• Wiki: Best Practices for Converting a Forum Thread into a New Wiki Article – This article is intended to be a list of all the best practices that you can have while converting a Forum thread into a new TechNet Wiki article.

BizTalk Open Source Contributions

Last year, I continued to contribute to open source projects, scripts, how-to tutorials, and demos that are available on several platforms:

• Microsoft TechNet Gallery with scripts and BizTalk Resources, my favorite one without a doubt: Collection of Visio 2013 Stencil for BizTalk Server, in a total of 8 contributions;
• Microsoft Code Gallery with small projects or code samples in a total of 13 contributions, again, my favorites are: Using EAI Bridges and LOB Target to connect to on-premises SQL Server and BizTalk Mapper Patterns: Working with Constant Values inside maps
• And with an open source project in CodePlex with a new version of BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack or BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter

Portugal Technical Articles (Minitel) and TechNet Wiki Blog

Last year, I began to contribute to the Minitel project with technical articles written in Portuguese, where I already have 3 published articles:

• BizTalk Server 2010 aos olhos dos programadores
• BizTalk Server – Princípios básicos dos Mapas
• BizTalk Server – Como funcionam os mapas

And I was invited to become part of the TechNet Wiki Blog contributes and start to write there about the TechNet Wiki:

• Interview with a Wiki Ninja: Lex Hegt
• Interview with a SharePoint MVP – André Lage
• Defining the Role of a TechNet Wiki Editor
• BizTalk TechNet Wiki Articles: Can I? or Should I?

And many other contributions…. Thanks for following me, for reading my blog, and I promise that I will continue to share my knowledge in 2014.