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With the announcement of Dublin and new features of WF 4.0, it’s probably hard to swallow that BizTalk will be a minor player in the years to come. It will not just die, but it will play a much less significant role than what Microsoft or any of the BizTalk fanboys lead you to believe. There are four things that will eventually move their stuff away from BizTalk and into Dublin+WF:

- Dublin has the features of BizTalk that is “good enough.” Let’s face it: BizTalk is nice, but it’s overkill for a lot of projects requiring EAI.
- New features of WF. If you don’t notice already, WF is what Orchestration should have been, and with WF 4.0 supporting CORRELATIONS (a big feature in BizTalk), there is even less reasons to use BizTalk.
- WF is more tightly-integrated with Visual Studio. I lamented during my discussion with the MS BizTalk program managers at TechEd 2009 that I should be able to debug Orchestrations in VS…because what they did instead in BT 2009 was to support debugging of maps! I mean WTF? Who uses the built-in maps in BizTalk when you can easily plug-in XSLTs?
- BizTalk pricing. As Dublin matures, there will be 3rd-party products out there that will make Dublin have most–if not all–of the features of BizTalk and at the same time, make it even cheaper. $25k per CPU isn’t going to be competitive for BizTalk anymore.

So, yeah…I know BizTalk gurus will start talking about the infrastructure being better BLAH BLAH BLAH…i didn’t say BizTalk will go away, but it will be relegated as a highly-specialized EAI platform for large-scale, highly fault-tolerant SOA applications.

BizTalk will also brag about its out-of-the-box “Adapters.” PLEASE. Let’s be real here: Adapters are just DLLs that implement a specific interface so BizTalk can use them. No, they really are just that. I can almost guarantee that once Dublin is available, there will be 3rd-party software that will allow you to use those adapters in Dublin.

So what has to change in BizTalk v.Next?

- GET RID OF ORCHESTRATIONS and adopt WF. There should be a tool that will enable you to migrate Orchestrations to WF automagically.
- Change the pricing scheme. I don’t know how, but
- Make BAM a separate product and enrich the API. Make it easier.
- ZOMG make installation easier.

/rant ends