Blog about BizTalk General Availability, published December 1, 2016.

1. Tuesday, October27, 2016
BizTalk 2016
By Abid Nasim/ CIO GENERALSOFT
BizTalk 2016 released for MSDN subscribers. BizTalk Enterprise and Standard editions are
now available on MSDN. This is the latest version of BizTalk since BizTalk 2013 R2. It aligns
Windows Server 2016, SQL Server 2016, and Visual Studio 2015 in the deployment and/or
development stacks.
Benefits
There have been some minor functional changes in the version, apart from the big addition
of Logic Apps adapter. But let me first talk about the indirect improvements via the OS and
RDBMS (and BI). First, SQL Server 2016 was designed with Azure in mind. It enables Always
On File Groups that provide High Availability (HA) like Windows Clustered Shares on both
on-premise as well as Azure Virtual Machines (VM’s), including for production use. Second,
since the development environment (IDE) is now Visual Studio 2015, Schemas and Maps
appear much better in high resolution Windows 10, in design mode. Third, and last, .net 4.5
allows: a) much faster execution; b) refactored WCF that allows enterprise wide
customizations (I’ll write about this soon) through custom behaviors.
As for the functional improvements, there are surprisingly large number, relatively speaking,
of them. The big one is the Logic Apps adapter, which provides a rather native integration
architecture with online services (including of course Azure). I will address this adapter in
detail in another blog. File Adapter now works with Azure Storage. FTP Adapter works with
more types of servers. SFTP has been refactored and much improved. Tracking Profile
imports and exports are configurable using settings (now you can use the same profile in
different environments like development and production). Service Bus (SB) supports a much
wider range of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) configurations. Ordered
Delivery on static send ports can be enabled with Administration Console. MIME encoders /
decoders now fully support SHA-2. Maps can use both compiled and runtime generated
maps. Administrative Console allows imports and export of parties, setting of multiple
hosts/host instances, search of artefacts, and saving of multiple suspended messages into a
single file. HL7 accelerator can now originate connection.