Adventures in BizTalkLand - Part 1

I thought it would be cool to document the learning process I will go trough learning BizTalk 2004.  At least, I'll have some form of trace that I can share with others at a later time.

Let start by saying that I never use previous versions of BizTalk so I'm pretty green.

The first thing I did was to download a few MSDN TV videos:
Developing for BizTalk Server 2004 Inside Visual Studio .NET
Building Your First Business Process

Both feature Scott Woodgate, a BizTalk program manager, who give an informative overview of how a business process is built with Visual Studio .NET.

I then tried to install BizTalk on my PC.  I'm running XP Pro and the installation document states that XP is supported.  My inner self told me that it would be better to install it on a fresh Windows Server 2003 in a VPC but I guess I was lazy after seeing that one of the requirements was C# and SQL Server; both were already installed in XP.  So I started the installation on XP.  The first thing you have to do is install a gazillion set of patches and updates, yikes!  After returning from reboot hell, I started the BizTalk installation.  The install went well, it's after that problems occured...

Welcome to the configuration wizard
After finishing the installation, BizTalk present you with this wizard.  You must at this point make important configuration decisions.  As a newbie, I was lost so I clicked the Help button and after reading the help topic, I was lost deeper!  The wizard states that the default settings should be used.  Hummmm, let's try this I said to myself.  Click next, click next, click next (hey, that's easy!).  At the end, the beloved wizard told me that it failed.  Arggggghhhhh!  I tried to run it again by disabling some features but no go, the wizard failed but did part of the work and didn't cleaned after itself.   Arggggghhhhh!

I then decided that lazyness was not a good idea (bummer!) and I should really install BizTalk on Windows Server 2003 so I deinstalled it from XP.

Next step...install BizTalk on a Windows Server 2003 VPC.