Clinic 2954

I’m currently working towards another certification. At this point in my career I don’t necessarily need another certification to prove my worth, however as a enterprise and software architect there are a couple of certifications I want to pursue if only to help round out and build upon my existing skill set.

The first of these is the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist certification focused on BizTalk. BizTalk, and SOA in general, sits at the heart of the enterprise and understanding concepts in that domain space is crucial to understanding how people and technology come together to form solutions.

For this certification there is only one exam (70-235) to pass so it should be relatively straight forward. I’m well versed in BizTalk already, so this journey will be mostly about fine tuning and brushing up my skills in areas of BizTalk that I might not have looked at recently. My first step was to take an overview to help identify the areas I still need work on.

The first course I looked at is a Microsoft E-Learning clinic. Clinic 2954: Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 for Developers. This is a self paced web-clinic. For anyone who already has development experience with the .NET framework, more specifically living in Visual Studio; I highly recommend this run through. It establishes a baseline level of terminology to help understand all of BizTalks parts including orchestrations, roles, security, tools, schemas, maps, functoids, pipelnes, ports, adapters, promotion, message correlation, filtering, and transactions. The clinic isn’t deep on tool use, but gives you a mapping of what parts are designed where, maps in BizTalk Mapper, schemas in BizTalk editor, etc.

Most importantly as an overview it guides you through what you’ll likely be utilizing BizTalk for in the first place. In the first half of the clinic it moves through the technology side in building a message integration solution. In the second half it was the more human side of building a long running human process solution. All told it’s a good 3-4 hours of material, and to my suprise there were quite a few things that I needed to brush up on.

Skills Needed for 70-235

• Planning a BizTalk Application
• Identify the application requirements
• Plan the BizTalk Server environment for reliability and scalability
• Design schemas
• Identify the security requirements
• Install BizTalk Server 2006 for a development environment
• Developing and Debugging an Integration Application
• Create a schema
• Create a map
• Create a pipeline
• Configure connectivity
• Configure message subscriptions
• Track a message
• Developing and Debugging a Business Process Application
• Create and debug an orchestration
• Configure correlation
• Identify persistence points
• Configure exception handling
• Create business transactions
• Consume and publish Web service
• Create and configure role links
• Implementing Business Rules
• Compose business rules
• Publish and deploy business rules
• Enabling Business Activity Monitoring
• Identify the steps required to enable business activity monitoring
• Link the event source to the activity definition
• Deploying a BizTalk Application
• Choose a deployment method for distributing an application
• Create a deployment package
• Start an application
• Test the deployment

The course gave me an overview for some of the material that will be on the exam, but I’ll need to dig further to fully prepare.