Well, it's done, it's happened and now it's time to look forward to the next one!
Yup, the 2nd meeting of the newly formed BizTalk User Group was held this week, 5 March 2008, at Microsoft's offices in Bryanston. Thanks again to Frikkie for arranging the venue and organising the fantastic refreshments!
What else do we need? Some BizTalk perhaps, well there was loads of that too...
We started off the evening watching a video clip from on10.net about how Blue C Sushi are using the new RFID technologies available in BizTalk 2006 R2 to power their business and improve their customer experience whilst reducing wastage and costs at the same time. Finally, a practical use for RFID!
This was followed by a Deep Dive into debugging your messaging solutions presented by Pieter van der Merwe from The Enabler Group. Pieter highlighted the use of some really cool techniques and tools for pinpointing some nastiness that are often not exactly visible.
After the break it was my turn to do a short and sweet high level introduction into WCF & BizTalk 2006 R2. I covered a simple scenario to illustrate how to consume a WCF service in a messaging only scenario and then proceeded to build the world's most complicated calculator 
by exposing a BizTalk orchestration that performed various simple operations on a set of numbers passed in and returned the result. I then demonstrated how to expose this as a WCF service using the publishing wizard.
All in all I think the meeting was a success. Nice to see some faces from the first meet back for version 2 ... must mean we're doing something right!
I will be posting a link to the PowerPoint slides and the sample code from the demos on to the group's site www.biztalkug.co.za in a short while and will probably update this post with the links too, so watch this space.
We are going to try and hold these session on the 1st Wednesday evening of every month, which makes the next get together of like minded souls 2nd April 2008. Invites will follow shortly...