Well the announcement came over a week after I thought it would arrive, but BTS2010
is now officially released. And the developer edition is now free.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can do development for free: you still need to
pay for SQL Server and Visual Studio.
Although having said that, SQL Server 2008 Dev edition is fairly cheap (as in, about
£20 on a select agreement), so the only real cost is Visual Studio… Still, it means
that there won’t be hoards of hobbyist devs out there trying out BTS, unless they
manage to get it running with Visual Studio Express (does that actually work? Never
tried it, but wouldn’t have thought so – might have a go tomorrow). Still, it means
that you no longer need an MSDN license to do BizTalk dev, which removes a huge barrier
for budding/hobbyist BizTalk devs. Especially if you want to start developing with
the AppFabric integration features in BTS 2010.
You can download the dev editions of BTS2010 and HIS2010 from here: