Adventures in BizTalkLand - Part 2

After my failed attempt at installing BizTalk 2004 onto XP, I prepared a VPC running Windows Server 2003 and went back to the BizTalk installation guide.

Welcome to the land of confusion...

I found a few points that created some confusion in my mind.  Things like:

Business Activity Services requires Windows SharePoint Services that require the FrontPage Server Extensions to be NOT installed.
BizTalk requires C# and Visual Studio .NET requires the FrontPage Server Extensions to be installed to be able to publish Websites on the server.
Damn! What to do?  I guess I won't need VS to publish ASP.NET apps but wait, what about Web Services?  Let's not bother about that BAS thing for now anyway, I haven't installed SharePoint Services, we'll see later.

BizTalk requires that IIS isolation mode must be turned off.
Windows SharePoint Services requires IIS isolation mode to be on.
Damn! What to do?  Since I haven't installed SharePoint Services, I won't bother but what if I had it installed?

The SOAP Toolkit 2 must be installed.
My first reaction was: Hey, version 3 is available, let's install version 3.  On second thought, let's stick to version 2.  But why not version 3 ?  At least specify that you can or not install version 3.

After walking in the land of confusion, I started the install and....success!  But that dreadful configuration wizard came back to haunt me.

Welcome to the land of ignorance.

The problem with this wizard is that you must make decisions that will impact your installation at a point where you may have not enough knowledge to make those decisions.  In other words, you must know what to do before running that thing.  Since I didn't had a clue (remember, I'm a BizTalk newbie), I selected the default settings and clicked next, next, next and next.  Success!  This time the wizard was happy (happier then on XP).

Next steps, some reading and the tutorials....