The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide is the third installment in a series of BizTalk IT Professional guides already available: “Microsoft BizTalk Server Operations Guide” and “Microsoft BizTalk Server Performance Optimizations Guide.” These guides are intended to provide easily accessible, hands-on guidance to customers and partners.

Gartner (June 3, 2008)  Service-oriented architecture, cloud computing, international e-commerce, proliferating business-to-business projects and changing user requirements are driving vendor innovation and consolidation in the B2B gateway software market. Gartner positions Microsoft in Leaders Quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for B2B Gateway Providers.

Microsoft reiterated its commitment to model-driven development and focus on helping developers realize the full potential of declarative programming, inspiring collaboration across organizational roles, and enabling developers and IT pros to more easily deploy, manage, and evolve applications. Microsoft will bolster its investments in a unified modeling platform code-named “Oslo,” which will be used by future versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft System Center, BizTalk Server, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Bill Gates discusses the future of application development and what to expect in the coming months. (1 min 44 sec)

The Southwest Florida Water Management District gained acclaim, in the SOA category of RDN’s First Annual Innovator Awards in the SOA category, with a well-construction permitting application that ties into a host of legacy systems. The SOA implementation, built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, ties together disparate Cobol applications, Oracle databases, an enterprise content-management repository, and a geographic information system to process 86 percent.

Building applications that span organizational and system boundaries presents significant challenges related to authentication, naming, security, and cross-organizational firewall traversal. BizTalk Services reduces the complexity in building composite applications by providing these capabilities as a hosted offering, allowing developers to refocus on truly differentiating features for their product.