Introducing Our Second Product – BizTalk NoS Ultimate

Published on : May 13, 2015

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Saravana

Author

Four years ago when I launched BizTalk360, I was all alone. It is such an enjoyable journey, learning all the ups and downs of perceiving an idea, converting it into a finished product, taking it to the market, and most importantly acquiring customers.  Today we are 30+ strong people, with offices in UK and India. As we grew, we kept our focus super sharp. There are always tons of problem to solve and most of the time it will be tempting to jump between ideas and not to do anything. In our case, in spite of all the criticism, we focused on building tools for BizTalk Server which is not a fancy platform as some of the other modern day stacks like Azure, IoT, Big Data, etc. Our objective is to solve the problem of the existing BizTalk Server customers in an effective & efficient way. So far, BizTalk360 has addressed the challenges on the BizTalk Server day-to-day operations, administration, and monitoring aspects. Today we are happy to introduce “BizTalk NoS Ultimate”. This is a BizTalk developer tool that can be installed as a Visual Studio plugin. The tag line of the product is “Your BizTalk Dev Buddy” and the name says it all. BizTalk NoS Ultimate

What Is BizTalk NoS Ultimate?

In general, BizTalk development is pretty brutal and requires lot of patience. Anyone who has worked with BizTalk long enough will acknowledge this statement. Let’s see an example scenario – you want to delete a schema from a BizTalk Application. This is not an easy job. There may be lot of references to that schema from other Schemas, BizTalk maps and Orchestrations either internally within the same project or from external assemblies. It will take lot of effort to identify all the references. BizTalk NoS Ultimate will help you to do this by just right clicking on the schema and say “Find all Reference”. All the references will be highlighted and you can even open all of them with a single click. This is just one example. BizTalk NoS Ultimate is packed with lot of such features, all focused on developer productivity. You can see the full set of features list here.

History Of BizTalk NoS

BizTalk NoS was originally built by Nino Crudele, one of the respected Microsoft Integration MVP. Nino demonstrated the product for the first time in BizTalk Summit 2014 (about a year ago). Every single attendee was mind-blown by his demo, including the Microsoft BizTalk product group members. He released the initial version as a community version and we saw huge traction from the community eagerly anticipating the product. 6 months later Microsoft even invited Nino to present the NoS addin at the INTEGRATE 2014 event in Redmond. Everything was good, but Nino with his full time job, moving his family from Italy to UK and taking up a new job with a consulting firm was not able to concentrate on the future development of BizTalk NoS. Based on community feedback (and Nino being a good friend!), we decided to take over BizTalk NoS and make it a commercially viable product so it can be built in a more robust way and can be released as a fully supported product. After INTEGRATE 2014, we sorted the commercial arrangements and took over the responsibility of delivering a fully functional BizTalk NoS Ultimate product. We put a team together, cleaned up the code, added some commercial elements like licensing, logging mechanism for supportability, branding, documentation, etc and pushed it to Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery, for anyone to download.

Quick Introduction Video

We really wanted all of you to watch the presentation given by Nino on this topic. Normally when Nino starts his presentation with his mock English (this is his own definition!), the audience would be less excited. But leave it to Nino for a couple of minutes, and he’s got the power to pull all of them together and make it like a live and active session rather than a serious technical presentation. You can watch his short 20 mins presentation from INTEGRATE 2014 here. If you are interested in the long 60 mins original presentation he did at BizTalk Summit 2014, you can watch it here “Thinking like an integration person”.

Where Can I Get A Trial Version?

Getting your hands on BizTalk NoS Ultimate is very easy. Simply open Visual Studio (2012 or 2013), go to Tools> Extensions and Updates. Click the Online tab on LHS and on the search box type “biztalk nos”. Alternatively you can open the search box using the Ctrl+E key combination. You will see straight away “BizTalk NoS Ultimate” listed as shown below. Click the “Download” button and follow the on-screen instructions. BizTalkBizTalk NoS Ultimate - Visual Studio Extensions and Updates Once installed, you’ll require a trial key to continue the evaluation. You can request for one at http://biztalk360.com/nos. You’ll receive an email with order number and license code, which you can enter by clicking on the BizTalk NoS Settings button in the Solution Explorer as shown below: BizTalk NoS Ultimate - Visual Studio Extensions and Updates

Feedback

Please provide us your feedback, if you would like to see any new features added to NoS. Please feel free to get in touch with us at nos_support@biztalk360.com. You can see the full details of BizTalk NoS Ultimate here – http://biztalk360.com/nos