BizTalk & Sharepoint Server Gigs

[Fran]

I've heard there are a shortage of contractors using BizTalk and Sharepoint Server. I'm thinking of training up in one or both as .Net seems to be less and less in demand at the moment.

Can anyone, verify these are in demand or not? A quick search didn't return that many jobs.

[DimPrawn]

BizTalk is nowhere near as mainstream as plain .NET dev work, hence not that many gigs, but by the same token, there aren't that many people with deep understanding of the product. So if you've got a few years experience on some big projects, you can pull in the work at a good rate.

I would say BizTalk is not something you can learn without doing it in a big way. It's not the product you need to learn more the holes/pitfalls/bugs to avoid and the correct patterns to apply and how to implement them correctly.

Good luck, you've got some serious learning to do.

[ChimpMaster]

Isn't BizTalk just a glorified integration tool? And by glorified I mean that it's just MS's way of trying to break into that market with a tool knocked up by one of their developers over a weekend. There are a number of far more advanced and better integration tools out there - such as some produced by IBM.

[DimPrawn]

Isn't BizTalk just a glorified integration tool? And by glorified I mean that it's just MS's way of trying to break into that market with a tool knocked up by one of their developers over a weekend. There are a number of far more advanced and better integration tools out there - such as some produced by IBM.

Probably. I don't know anything about the competition. BizTalk is not a great tool, but it is popular with clients firmly in the MS camp.

[Cowboy Bob]

I've seen better integration done with a few Perl scripts and an FTP server. BizTalk is awful, and as soon as the suc^H^H^Hcustomers catch on they'll drop it like a stone. I wouldn't bother going through the pain of learning it to be honest. Stick with dev work, it's got more legs.

[DimPrawn]

The future of BizTalk

BizTalk as we know it is slowly going away. There will be future products called BizTalk, but rather than being a strange standalone, unwieldly and odd beast, it will be tools to sit on top of the following core .NET technologies:

Windows Workflow Foundation
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/net.../aa663328.aspx

Windows Communication Foundation
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/net.../aa663324.aspx

So if you are going to become an expert in anything (Microsoft and integration related), these are the ones to master.

[shelby68]

Isn't BizTalk just a glorified integration tool? And by glorified I mean that it's just MS's way of trying to break into that market with a tool knocked up by one of their developers over a weekend. There are a number of far more advanced and better integration tools out there - such as some produced by IBM.

I think its just a message brokering tool like MQ but all I remember about it was how unreliable it was unlike MQ which seems fairly stable, however, as it's got the MS stamp on it no doubt it will sell well, as far as Sharepoint goes I've also heard there is a shortage of people to do it.

[shelby68]

To be honest if I was looking for a career change I'd go down the virtualisation route, I've a feeling thats going to be huge.

VMWare, ESX etc.