First Steps: Developing BizTalk Applications is a primer to most other introductory BizTalk books. If you feel like traditional beginning books are too abstract, and that you are mired in detail and missing the “big picture,” check out this book. It's not a reference—it's a jumpstart to learning BizTalk. You'll learn about the product in a phased approach. This way, you only learn what you need to know, when you need to know it. And the entire book is example-based: you'll learn by doing. Each phase provides detailed instructions for creating, deploying, and testing a BizTalk project. Through the books projects, you will be exposed to orchestrations, pipelines, maps, schemas, messages, ports, shapes, the BizTalk Server Administration console, and the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) tool. To quickly get ahead and quick–start your BizTalk learning process, this book is for you.