Make BizTalk part of VS.NET & free
In a pod cast on DNR sometime back, with guest Aaron Skonnard, Richard Campbell suggested that it was time for BTS to be made free or at least parts of it. Richard also proposed that such a free product should be tooled as a part of the VS.Net out of the box experience.
I must concur with Richard on this view of the future for BizTalk Server. BTS includes some outstanding tools that developers would find incredibly useful and lowering the price barrier to entry would no doubt see a surge of solutions deployed using BizTalk and increase developer adoption of the product vastly and with haste.
Personally I find the BizTalk Mapper a compelling tool and have found it very useful in transforming data where it would have required significantly more effort to code a solution. One of the interesting byproducts of this tool is that it produces XSLT which can be reused outside of the BTS environment and executed out of band in any CLR process. NICE!
Recently Microsoft also announced the coming release of the R3 CTP for BizTalk 2006 and it included several ’so called’ SOA features. Personally I believe MS should make BizTalk available to developers to deploy at any point of their solutions, whether it be clients or service hosts etc. Give us a tool with BTS like functionality and allow us to deploy it anywhere in our architecture (free of course - just like WCF et-al) and watch the product uptake go through the roof. No doubt Microsoft would be able to find a way to support a free license version and allow for a continued Enterprise version at the more costly prices.
