Saravana kumar [MCAD (Charter member), MCP (BizTalk 2004)] is an independent consultant focused solely on Microsoft based integration solutions using BizTalk Server. He is currently living and working in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Microsoft recently published his white paper Understanding Design-Time Properties for Custom Pipeline Components in BizTalk Server

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Why another aggregator?. Over a period of time there will be new people start blogging about BizTalk and some people tend to leave using BizTalk (Ex: Scott Woodgate, EldarM). Our local aggregators are not always upto date, we don't include new feeds that often into our aggregators.

There are few consolidated OPML files for BizTalk resources, but its not a trivial task to override your aggregator feeds with an OPML file. In our case we know exactly what we are targetting at, we need all the BizTalk blogs at one place. That's the root cause for this new aggregator.

It's very simple interface, on the Left Hand Side navigation you got two options. 1. Select the duration for latest feeds, and 2.If required hide unnecessary no content links. BizTalk blogs aggregator uses cookies, so it will remember your selection, for your next visit. On the right hand side the select blog feeds new content within that duration will be shown. On the top of the page you can see when it was last polled. It also differentiates MSDN blogs with different icon .Still if you prefer to use only your own Aggregators, OPML file is provided for all the feeds used by Biztalk 24 * 7.

Customized SEARCH Functionality for BizTalk resources is one of the key aspects of BizTalk 24 * 7. We take advantage of Windows Live Search targeting BizTalk resources.The search will be performed on the BizTalk specific resources and organized seperately in different tabs as shown below.

Here is an example of how it will be helpful. In the search box above enter the keywords "xpath function". If you try these keywords in any of your favorite search engines the most likely result will be something to do with XML, XSL, W3C, XPATH reference etc. But what we were expecting here is "xpath()" BizTalk utility function available inside orchestration. Screen shots below shows the result in different targeted tabs. You can see clearly the very first result on the "All BizTalk Blogs" and "MSDN BizTalk Blogs" is what we expected.

Most of the stuff in BizTalk 24 * 7 is taken from different BizTalk blogs, Microsoft Biztalk resource centres and some community websites.