Jeff first approached me for a little advice on this book at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference in October 2008. After he described his plan for the book, the first words out of my mouth were, “It’s about time.” Jeff, being the great guy that he is, didn’t take any offense at all and understood what I meant right off the bat.

What I meant is that BAM has been the secret weapon of the advanced BizTalk and .NET developer for far too long. It’s not unusual for people to walk up to me and strike up a conversation around BizTalk projects that they’ve worked on. Being a bit of a snarky guy, I always ask for their thoughts on BAM early in the conversation. Depending on the answer, I can just about always tell how good a BizTalk developer they are from that single question. It’s only the deeply insightful developer who ever seems to get to BAM.

I’ve always thought this odd. Mastering BAM isn’t as easy as falling off a turnip truck, but neither is it the hardest technology that I’ve ever learned (not by a long shot!). Sure there are many, many features in BizTalk Server to occupy any earnest enterprise application developer for hours and hours. I firmly believe that BAM should be the first thing a BizTalk developer learns right after Orchestration.

We develop enterprise class applications for customers. Whether those customers are from the same organization as we are or we’re doing spec work for an outside company, pleasing customers is usually high on the list of requirements. Pleasing customers includes leaving them with a feeling of confidence in the work and in us personally as developers and service providers. Confidence stems from trust: trust in our insight into their specific problem solution and trust of our code to provide insight into the internal workings of that system. This is the core value of BAM. Opening up an insightful view into an opaque system for the operations staff and end users builds trust and confidence (and more often than not, repeat business).

The investment it takes to learn BAM and to put it in every major application we build is miniscule—especially when compared to the comfort our customers feel from the trust gained via insight into the system. This book is your first step into becoming a more insightful enterprise developer, not to mention a developer who can easily impress at cocktail parties with your advanced knowledge of BizTalk Server and .NET development. (But be quick! Once this book makes the rounds, the secret will be out of the bag, and everyone will be doing BAM.)

Michael Woods
Group Product Manager
Developer Platform Technical Product Management
Microsoft Corporation