Booting @ Teched - PRE001 Biztalk

Settled on the premises and online with just a minor hassle I'm well into the pre-conf session on BizTalk:

PRE001 Building an End-to-End Integration Infrastructure with BizTalk Server 2004

Eric Van Bever walks through BizTalk functionality talking demonstrating the various features. When he talks about functoids a slight resemblence to the professor in futurama might be noted.

As previous BizTalk presentations I've seen, this reminds me about the earlier demos of VS.NET where all the cool features are cooked together as quick as possible. I miss the architecture aspect. The demos need a more realistic scenario than "we're gonna move this message from this place, flip it a couple of times, and push it out again". They should create realistically segmented projects in the demo, and point out best practices. For example I would imagine that the inline functoid scripting tool-thingy isn't really very wise to use in a larger project.

I want to know more about the typical lifecycle of the biztalk project. I'm sure there are obvious answers to my questions but I'll pose them anyway:

• What about testing considerations? Scott Colestock is addressing this issue, so far I've seen nothing from MSFT.
• How will BizTalk projects align with the upcoming Team Services? How will several developers collaborate on a BizTalk project?
• How to properly document the integration design? 
• How about architecture? How should biztalk components be designed to avoid a complete mess when the projects grow?

The PAG team should get in the game and give us guidelines so that we'll avoid having to clean up a lot of messy BizTalk projects in a couple of years time, just as we're doing with early .NET applications today.

I realize that the main focus now is to get us (developers and wallets) excited about functionality, but my excitement will remain on a leach until I feel comfortable with the managebility, testability and build/deploy considerations related to BizTalk.