Well as predicted, it's out, slipped out last night Redmond time, all complete and with extras.

Be sure to read this: BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 Readme

However you can download it here: BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1

Whilst you should install it everywhere, be sure you test your soution in your test labs with sp1 before installing it into your live enviroment, this should be the case with all HotFixes and Service packs.

BTW: It comes with MSMQC, well worth a look.

Well done to the whole team who put this together and spent many hours diagnosing and resolving bugs. Special “effort” thanks to Lee, who re-wrote a large section of the system to resolve a few very critical bugs.

There is an additional piece you will need, as there were some service pack fixes from .NET Framework 1.1 used in the sp1, around web services. These are crucial, make sure you install them if you want to do any high performance web service work with BizTalk 2004.

·         BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 Update for .NET Framework 1.1

·         BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 Update for .NET Framework 1.1 on Windows Server 2003

We had major problems with web services using the soap adapter and this resolves some of the performance issues.

Bundled with this release is the Adapter Migration Toolkit, designed to make it easier to migrate 2002 AIC's to 2004. I have not used this before however take care when using tools that say they can migrate 2002 to 2004, they are very different beasts and you may need to do some additional work with your migrated adapter to make it work in a high performance scenario.

Some more details on the Adapter Migration Toolkit (AMT):

AMT is designed to simplify migration of BizTalk 2002 solutions to BizTalk 2004 by providing three key pieces:
  • The generation of wrappers for BizTalk 2002 Application Integration Components (AICs) so that they can be used as BizTalk 2004 adapters and pipeline components;
  • The wrapper for BizTalk 2002 custom preprocessors so that they can be used as BizTalk 2004 pipeline components; and
  • Implementation of BizTalk 2002 IInterchange to facilitate migration of BizTalk 2002 applications that submitted messages bypassing specific transports directly into BizTalk.
    Please, read readme file for more details    .