At TechEd there were quite a lot of sessions/cabanas around BizTalk 2006 and they had a couple of labs on the new version. The handed out some TechEd CTP builds as well at an install party. Perhaps they will do that on the other TechEds as well.
The main changes/updates for the new 2006 version is the new MMC-admin interface where you can more easily manage your suspended messages and the messaging components. You can group by application (property of the project) and restart/shutdown etc a whole application with all its send ports, receive locations and orchestration. You can group errors by error-code and other variables as well, making it much more easy to see what types of errors you have instead of going through thousands of errors in the event log. The MOM package for BizTalk 2006 is improved as well.
They have added new adapters (POP3 & SharePoint) and included others out of box, which were separate add-ons before (MSMQ, MQSeries). Ordered delivery is supposed to work for most adapters now as well.
Upgrading from 2004 is supposed to be smooth. I guess BizTalk 2006 is like a version 2 of BizTalk 2004, like BizTalk 2002 was a version 2 of BizTalk 2000.
BizTalk 2006 development requires Visual Studio 2005. You don't need Visual Studio or some other hacks in your production environments any longer, since everything is available in the new MMC-admin. Of course you need .NET Framework 2.0. It will run on either SQL 2005 or SQL 2000 as well.
So try it out if you got the CTP or wait for beta 1, which I believe is going public! There are no dates on the RTM yet, but my totally unofficial guess is a couple of months (3-6) after the releases of SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.
Happy mid-summer!
/Niklas
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