Well it's official, I will be taking on a bit of a Biztalk 2004 role here at work.  I'm pretty excited as I have wanted to learn Biztalk for quite a while, but it's not really the kind of thing I could see myself just doing for kicks. 

So you can expect to see more about biztalk as I go down this road. 

With absolutely no Biztalk experience, I figured I would start by reading the documentation (seems logical).  Our resident Biztalk expert (who has no blog) reminded me to do the documentation update, so thats where I started.  Not to rant, but why the hell do I need to have the original biztalk CD to install the documentation upgrade?  Of course I don't carry around our msdn binders (for fear of the IT folk cutting off my hands), so I was SOL.  I think it's kind of ridiculous to require the original CD for a documentation upgrade, but whatever.  Thats out.

So I started to read the bloggers guide to biztalk.  After making it through just a couple of the essays in here, I can say this is going to be a huge resource for me.  There is just a ton of content here, and at least what I saw was good content.  Real good.  I also appreciate that it is off the cuff, so it seems very honest. 

By the way, the biztalk install went pretty smoothly.  Our IT crew provided me with the staging doc that was used for the production build, and with a couple alterations I was up and going.  One word of warning, though.  When you install Biztalk make sure you have a path to your domain controller.  I run my domain at home, so my laptop is actually a member of my personal domain, not the corporate one.  This meant that I couldn't finish the config wizard until I was at home.  I hope this is an isolated requirement since I really dont want to promote my laptop to a DC. 

Ah some other links I found that I want to save. 

Aaron Skonnard on Biztalk and SOA
Jame's Blog with some interesting biztalk posts a while back I need to read (subscribed)
Jan Tielen with some biztalk 2004 downloads (subscribed)
Some biztalk articles refered to by James (above) by Canonical

 [Edit] Added biztalk category.