Last week Microsoft announced the next release of BizTalk Server, for now called 2010 R2. Charles Young already wrote an overview of the features and product positioning, but I highlight two: the support for Informix V11 (I’ve had this need more than once, and had to resort to ODBC as an alternative – it was even announced for BizTalk 2010 and then dropped in RTM), and the further integration with the Azure Service Bus. The current BizTalk Server 2010 Feature Pack already supports limited integration with it – basically, exposing services in the bus, but in my tests I’ve had inconsistent behavior using it and connection drops, and the lack of logging is a problem.
I also find the new licensing models interesting, namely to support hosting scenarios, but I can’t really see how the product is going to support this if it doesn’t support application isolation today.
