Customer Reviews

Pro Mapping in BizTalk Server 2009 (Expert's Voice in BizTalk)

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If you're going to create data transformations with the BizTalk Mapper, this book will be invaluable. Get it and save yourself a lot of time.

In the first 100 pages the authors explain what you need to know about how the Mapper works and the basic techniques for creating and testing maps. The remaining 300 pages present increasingly complex examples of how to solve real-world problems with the Mapper. This includes over 100 pages dealing with EDI examples. Though obviously relevant for EDI developers, these examples should be studied by anyone using the Mapper, because EDI pushes the Mapper's capabilities to the limit.

I think the most valuable part of the book is Chapter 9, "Collecting Data", which explains how to create custom data structures inside maps, store them in global variables, and manipulate them in scripting functoids. These techniques aren't described in any other book that I know of, but the authors demonstrate how they hold the key to solving some of the most daunting challenges with the Mapper.

The authors tell you early in the book that you'll need to understand XSLT to use the Mapper effectively, and they use Inline XSLT in many of their examples. But they don't provide a general introduction to XSLT or XPATH, so you'll need to refer to a different work for that, such as Michael Kay's.

The book's organization, writing style and code samples are clear and to the point. The layout and editing live up to the usual Apress standards.

This is is a great book to have for mapping reference and to help crack some hard mapping nuts, especially if you are mapping difficult schemas like EDI. Unfortunately it does not cover the new unit testing features in BizTalk 2009 and some of the screenshots are from BizTalk 2006. But don't be fooled - the book has great guidance, best practices, and examples of BizTalk mapping and there is no other book out there with so much info on the topic.

THE BEST BOOK ON MAPPING!!! PERIOD. Here's why... I've been working with BizTalk since it came out in late 2000. Since that time, I've always noticed a considerable gap between my everday use and understanding of current .NET technologies and that of my knowledge of mapping and XSLT. Historically, XSLT has been used for transforming documents that are intended mostly for "web presentation" and also, though less often, for transforming documents from one generic format to another. Programmers like myself who are savvy with OOP and the latest .NET concepts that focus on the middle tier are seldomly exposed to XSLT. For that reason, best practices within the BizTalk Mapper are few and far between. Ask anyone why they have a project in their solution called "BizTalkHelper" filled with static or serializable BizTalk helper functions and they'll all give you the same answer... "Because I have a transformation that's too hard for the mapper." I rarely meet any colleague or coworker who proves otherwise. For that reason Jim Dawson and John Wainwright must be considered the best in the business. Since discovering this book, I have contacted them to give praise and to seek further guidance, and my opinion of them has continued to grow from there. If you want to learn advanced mapping techniques from the guys who do it for a living, this is one stop shopping!