Microsoft's announcement of BizTalk 2020
In early June, Microsoft’s own Paul Larsen announced the release of BizTalk 2020 to be scheduled for this year.
It's been almost three years since the the last release of Microsoft's enterprise integration server, BizTalk Server 2016, became available in September of 2016.
The next version of BizTalk will be available in the end of 2019. Next year, Microsoft announced BizTalk vNext would be releases approximately nine months after Windows Server 2019.
Enhancements in BizTalk 2020
What can we expect from BizTalk 2020? The following features are shared by Paul Larson:
- Advances scheduling with the ability to set up reoccurrence on BizTalk server receive locations with greater precision using time-zones, months, weeks and days.
- Web Administration with the option to manage BizTalk server environments to use standard RESTful Webservices API’s.
- BizTalk server tracking data can be sent to Application Insights for extensible analytics, to understand performance and usage of BizTalk Server.
- BizTalk server tracking data can be sent to Event Hubs.
- PowerBI can be used to analyze and report BizTalk Server tracking data using the power BI BizTalk Operational data template, for use with Power BI visualizations and dashboards.
- Deployments and updates with Visual Studio Team Services to make Application Lifecycle Management easier.
- Administration to restrict privileges to view existing configuration.
- Transport Layer Security 1.2, authentication and encription when deploying BizTalk Server.
- BizTalk back-up job to write back-ups to blob storage.
- Using the BizTalk Server SQL Adapter to read and write to SQL Server always encrypted columns.
BizTalk Server Migration Tool
Microsoft IT developed a migration tool to migrate BizTalk Server from versions 2010, 2013, 2013R2 and 2016 to BizTalk 2020.
It will enable us to perform connectivity test of source and destination SQL Instance or Server, identify BizTalk application sequence, retain file share permissions, ignore zero KB files, ignore files which already exist in destination, ignore BizTalk application which already exist in destination, ignore Assemblies which already exist in destination and backup all artifacts in a folder.
Features Available
- Windows Service
- File Shares (without files) + Permissions
- Project Folders + Config file
- App Pools
- Web Sites
- Website Bindings
- Web Applications + Virtual Directories
- Website IIS Client Certificate mapping
- Local Computer Certificates
- Service Account Certificates
- Hosts
- Host Instances
- Host Settings
- Adapter Handlers
- BizTalk Applications
- Role Links
- Policies + Vocabularies
- Orchestrations
- Port Bindings
- Assemblies
- Parties + Agreements
- BAM Activities
- BAM Views + Permissions
Features unavailable
- SQL Logins
- SQL Database + User access
- SQL Jobs
- Windows schedule task
- SSO Affiliate Applications
The software runtime is shared on OneDrive, and code could be found on GitHub.
BizTalk remains
In my last article on the future of BizTalk I talked about my hopes for a 2019 version of Microsoft’s Enterprise Integration tool, and about the skeptics.
I am of course thrilled about the announcement (the only one who let out an excited cheer), but my colleagues were yet again skeptic. Most of the professionals I spoke to are positive this will be the last BizTalk Server version to be released, because Azure will be taking over all BizTalk functionality.
My opinion is, that they really don’t know how extraordinary BizTalk is! I can’t wait to see what the future of integration will bring us.
For now I am looking forward to using the new migration tool and trying new functionality of BizTalk 2020!