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.. is a ripoff. Especially when you consider all the extras you need for it.

I was amazed by the MS demonstration of it at DevDays. They showed us a very simple customer order screen. Of course, all the other products required for it (MS Office Pro, VS.Net, BizTalk, MS SQL Server, etc) would have easily cost a company a lot of money. From talking to other people there, they all had the same impression.

You seem to be forgetting that Microsoft goes to great lengths to make products that work well with other MS software with little to no advantage with those from other vendors.

No, I never forgot that. For example, the only DB that MS InfoPath can access is MS SQL. It is all about product lock-in.

I was just saying that BizTalk = ripoff and wate of money.

"From talking to other people there, they all had the same impression."

Ditto. That was exactly my impression and that of others who saw the demo. Granted, it is a really sweet deal. However, deployment of this would even empty the deepest of pockets. They are going to need to get really creative with their pricing to make this fly.

Its mapper is pretty good. It works various data sources. I thought the way it mapped xml was fairly intuitive.

http://www.xenos.com/solutions/prod_goxml_transform.asp

Anyone know of any open source projects that are jumping into this void?

Hi, I'm the lead technical product manager for BizTalk Server 2004. I just finished reading this article and couln't resist jumping in to respond to some of the interesting comments.

1. When we designed the editor and mapper our goal was to create tools that worked for all different formats to support our integration broker. For example our mapper can map data from flat-files, EDI files etc. and as such the design patterns used don't make the same assumptions as some other XML only tools. Further we assume the tool will mostly be used by customers using our runtime infrastructure, rather than a generic XSLT designer, hence the strong tie to the .NET framework for example.

2. Re: DevDays demo. It is our goal to ensure BizTalk Server works well with other Microsoft products and also that we have great interop with non-Microsoft products. If you see value in the using other MS products with BizTalk Server because of their functionality and how easy it is to use them-then great, we succeeded. If you don't see value- that's ok too; its your choice.

3. Re: Overkill. BizTalk Server Partner Edition costs less than $USD1000 for a production license and includes a license of Visual Studio .NET for BizTalk Server development and InfoPath for use with BizTalk Server, runs on MSDE etc. That's very cost effective compared to the other integration brokers in the industry.

4. .NET objects in the mapper. The article is correct when it points out we discourage the use of .NET objects directly inside the map. While this is possible, we encourage good developer design which is encapsulating code in external assemblies. This turns out to be much better because you have a single assembly with code shared across multiple maps that can be versioned once and managed more easily.

Thanks to the author for writing this article. If anyone wants to post a review including BizTalk Server I'd encourage you to get in contact with me as I'm happy to provide BizTalk Server 2004 technical information. You can get me through my blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/scottwoo

Cheers,
Scott.

If you are looking for a truly butt kicking XSLT mapper, try Stylus Studio. Unlike Mapforce, Stylus Studio allows full 2-way editing and you are always working with your native XSLT transformations. Mapforce is a one-way XSLT code generator. You can not import and edit XSLT. Stylus also includes powerful auto-complete, previewing, debugging and profiling capabilities not provided by Mapforce.

Stylus Studio also works well in the .Net environment.