Hi Folks,

Just finished the BizTalk 2006 Exam with a score of 985, I got one question wrong in the Enable Business Activity Monitoring section, I would like to take the opportunity to explain what you need to do to pass this exam from a practical perspective and get the best out of the experience!

1. Develop a Custom Send Pipeline
   1. Write a custom Disassemble Component
   2. Configure XSD Validation
2. Develop a Custom Receive Pipeline
   1. Write a custom Assemble Component

While we are on the subjects of pipelines, I think one of the biggest grey areas is debugging these buggers, I will provide an article at a later stage on how to effectively debug a Custom Pipeline Component.

1. Buy the book BizTalk 2006 Recipes and do all the exercises pertaining to BAM
2. Understand how to configure a Schema for Tag Identifiers, so that you can exclude Header and Footer Info or repeating fields
   1. Read about Tag Identifiers in the properties of Schema’s
3. Buy the book BizTalk 2006 Recipes and do all the exercises pertaining to BRE
4. Understand Assert and Retract built in functions in BRE and how custom fact retrievers work
5. Write your own Custom fact Retriever in C# and assert it into the Rule Engine at runtime
6. Understand how to priorities rules
7. Be familiar with the basics of the BizTalk Mapper (Lovely tool for small schemas, a death trap for large and complicated schema’s)
8. Orchestrations
   1. Learn about exception handling
   2. Learn about Persistence points and what shapes cause them!
   3. Understand Correlation inside out
9. Do not underestimate the usefulness of Dynamic Ports and Role Links!
10. The HAT tool was cool for school in BizTalk 2004, but in 2006 the HAT tool is there for those dev’s that were used to using it in 2004, so please focus on BizTalk Administration Tool and HUB Page.
11. Write at least one batch file to deploy an MSI package automatically with BTSTASK (BTSDEPLOY sucks, never use it!)
12. Know how to export and import MSI packages
13. Know how to export and import Rules
14. Have a good understanding of how you can use host instances to organize where receive and send locations run on
15. Remember the golden rule; always put common artifacts in one application. This makes deployment much easier
16. Read the BizTalk 2006 book by Wrox Press
17. Read the BizTalk 2006 book by Wrox Press again

I cannot delve to deep about the exam, but I think the above list is a good place to start, I never used any of the MOC material for the exam, the MOC material is great to get an idea, but to really understand the details, much better to get the BizTalk 2006 Recipes book and develop hands-on!

Good Luck

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