Recently, I've been thinking of ranting about Microsoft's BizTalk 2010 release plan. I was not only going to blog about it; but was also thinking to vent my frustration all over the net. Why??? Well.... Microsoft always found it difficult to release BizTalk in conjunction with the newest .NET and Visual Studio releases. On some occasions they were delayed by more than a year. It makes it difficult for organizations like ours to come up with a good upgrade strategy. Some applications can be upgraded immediately whereas BizTalk systems are forced to stay on the older version of .NET. As a result, organizations were forced to maintain multiple versions of Visual Studio and .NET. It gets difficult to move developers from one project to another utilizing different versions of Visual Studios. It can also become a licensing nightmare.
Last year, I had read about Microsoft trying to release BizTalk 2010 (previously named BizTalk 2009 R2) along with Visual Studio 2010 release. I was excited. Then Visual Studio 2010 launch came and went by. All I could see, BizTalk 2010 beta is ready for download. Some talked about a possible release early next year. I was like... not again!!! We briefly talked about moving other applications to Visual Studio 2010 in our organization. We also started to lay the foundation to move from BizTalk 2006 to 2009 thinking 2010 would come out some time next year. One might say, why not wait for a few months instead of upgrading to 2009. The last time we had planned to upgrade to BizTalk 2006 R2, we started hearing about BizTalk 2009. We waited and waited. Then eventually BizTalk 2009 got released; but our priorities got shifted. Then by the time we started thinking about BizTalk 2009, we stared hearing about BizTalk 2009 R2. Obviously, when Visual Studio 2010 got released with no sign of immediate BizTalk 2010 release plans, my frustration started to mount. Then all of sudden... bam!! BizTalk 2010 is released. Even though Microsoft has released it a few months after Visual Studio 2010, it's a huge progress compared to the previous years. I am pleasantly surprised. Now, we can have a good upgrade plan.