A couple of weeks ago I decided to install BizTalk 2004.
I get a fair number of calls looking for people who know it, but all of my experience is with BizTalk 2000 and 2002.
I have not spent much of the intervening time on getting it working as I usually try to get it working for an hour or two and then get stuck on some problem with the install then decide to play WOW some more, that game is addicting, today I decided to finally get it working no breaks.
Most Microsoft products you can just run the installer leave the defaults alone and you will get a working product in the end. With BizTalk this is not the case, you need to install a slew of service packs and other software first before you can begin the install, well can is a bit strong, you can start without the prerequisites the install will just crash and burn at some point along the process. I did a one day class on BizTalk 2004 back when it was still in beta the class only covered using some aspects of the product, now I know why they didn't have us install it.
During the install process I also uncovered some issues with my home network and learnt a few new things about Active Directory. I have never really played with an Active Directory network before from the administrative side the last time I managed a Windows network NT4 was just coming out so everything was still using the SAM system. One of the big changes with Active Directory, I thought, was the multiple master system for domain controllers no more messing around with PDCs and BDCs.
If you have been reading my blog you know I recently upgraded my main server and retired the old one. One of the problems I was having with the BizTalk install is that it was erroring out on the account creation step. After cursing the helpful message telling me to contact the administrator, but that's me, tell be something useful, I eventually tried manually creating a new user account and found that I could not. So I turned the retired server back on, I am glad a second time for not rebuilding it with XP account creation worked again. So much for the multiple master marketing tale. So now how do I promote the new box. As it turns out there are four different things you need to change if you are retiring the master, master. I will leave it up to you to figure out what because I didn't bookmark the sites with instructions and don't want to look for it again.
The next hurdle to overcome was that my original plan was to install BizTalk on one machine and use my existing SQL install and VS.NET install on other machines, and not bother with SharePoint. With the trouble I was having I ending up installing both SQL, VS.NET, and SharePoint on the virtual machine hosting the BizTalk Install. Some other day I will talk about the differences between SharePoint and SharePoint, anyway I don't want to learn that much about either SharePoint yet so I decided not to install the bits of BizTalk that require it.
That last decision made and I have a working install. Well one that finished anyway now to see if anything I did during that training is still knocking around in my head. If I like how it works the next thing to do will be to build another server as a "production" machine and see how to roll out a working orchestration from "dev" to "production". For the purposes of my simulation I will not do what a full shop would do which would be dev to QA to production. If that sounds like a lot you should probably have a pre-production environment as well. This should be another article also as what I have written before is locked away and forgotten.