Came across a very interesting video on Channel 9 dealing with the future BizTalk Solution Designer. It looks really good and now i cant wait to get my hands on it. I was thinking of experimenting with DSL's in VS2005 and building something that does a very similar task, to be able to graphically sketch out stuff from receieve adapters, through locations, pipelines, orchestrations and into the message box (and out again). And I want to be able to use GAT packages , project templates and so on. Well, we might have some of that when the official tool comes out.
The only 'drawback' perhaps, is that it isnt built using the Whitehorse kind of design surface nor is it done with the DSL design tools available today. Now this could be for a very good reason. The AD surface probably just isnt rich enough (and when you see the whizzy stuff in the BTS SD like the redrawing and consolidation of shapes you will understand why) and the DSL tools are still in a very early stage, although some folks are managing to put them to good use (such as the DSL that goes with WSCF) But Im sure this wont be insurmountable. After all, they are looking at a release date beyond 2006 for this tool and the DSL team would sure love to get their hands on a real world killer application (not to mention that AD could be done with the DSL designer too, the ultimate dog-fooding) which would help them mature their product really quickly.
The other reason they should do it is for platform/tool coherence sake. As it is there is a big divergence in tools. I discussed this with some of the project team reps in TechEd Amsterdam. For instance Beat Schwegler demo'ed the Melted Cheese GAT package where his webservice consisted of around 8 projects. That was all well and good, but if you put a Webservice in your project design surface in AD, it generates a single project. There is no way to customize it to make it generate an entire solution for the WS like the GAT package would have us do, neither can it use Enterprise Templates, nor can it even be customized with Project Templates (the simplest of the lot) so that doesnt leave architects with many options if you want to spec out a multi solution architecture (of course you could manually refactor the stuff and extract the WS into its own solution and have an AD for that alone) but then you lose some of the point of using the AD in the first place as it would be just a pretty model. Apparently there are some efforts on to get some convergence in these tools so that architecture creation and representation is more consistent and I for one am very eager to see the progress here.
So coming back to the point, I like the idea of the solution designer and for MS sake i hope things progress to the point where this utilises the DSL designer. Wonder what Steve Cook would say to this.