I am Excited! I am sitting in the Copenhagen Airport feeling a little strange after a very overpriced spaghetti bolognaise, looking at a good eleven hours flight ahead of me – and still I am exited!

I am heading to the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference, held by the BizTalk team, right there on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. I was lucky enough to attend the same conference last year and it was great.

There were a lot of really good speakers talking about interesting things that they actually knew something about. A fine mix between sessions with business, architect and developer approaches to the world of service oriented solutions and process management. And I even got to see a couple of quite deep technical ones as well. Another overall thing I liked about the conference was that all the speakers had a realistic and practical approach to what service orientation is and how it can be utilized.  No sales talk – at least not too much – and no “SOA is the answer to all the questions you can come up with”.

And the conference was the first time I heard (I think this goes for most people) about the ESB guidance from Microsoft – I saw two excellent presentations on it given by Marty Wasznicky and Richard Seroter the masterminds behind the project. I think it is safe to say that even though the solution behind the guidance is big and quite a mouthful it contains so many good ideas and approaches that there should be something in there for everybody working with BizTalk solutions at a certain level.

Anyway I am heading back to the conference again this year and am really excited to be going. And although I admit that I due to quite a heavy workload in the last couple of weeks haven’t looked as much at the agenda and sessions, I know that there will be a lot of good stuff this year as well.

I hope to be posting throughout the conference so come back anytime for an update.