Who this book is for

This book is targeted at software architects, solution architects, and developers of BizTalk solutions. The technical focus will make the book less applicable to managers unless they have a fairly deep technical background, but it will still be useful for them to assure that their teams stay on track to developing effective BizTalk solutions according to time tested patterns and practices.

This book does not expect any level of experience with BizTalk. It is targeted at the beginner or intermediate BizTalk developer who has previous experience developing on the Microsoft platform in .NET and Visual Studio. If you have absolutely no experience with Visual Studio, then BizTalk will likely be more of a challenge to you and I recommend working with C# or Visual Studio a little on your own, ahead of time, to familiarize yourself with the IDE experience.

I strongly believe even advanced BizTalk developers will learn very much from the book, as it presents patterns and practices that are ideal for BizTalk solutions, but are largely not common knowledge in the BizTalk developer community. Cursory knowledge of XML, although useful, is not required. The book does include an XML primer in the appendix, so if you're new to XML you may want to read through this. The material in this book has successfully trained dozens of .NET developers as well as Fox Pro, Java, and iSeries programmers who have no .NET experience at all.

BizTalk is a departure from almost any other platform most of us have worked on, but it is largely a step up into a more abstract level that allows us to focus more on the business solution and less on the infrastructure involved.