Yogi Veda and I took a look at BizTalk 2009 Beta installed on Windows 2008 and SQL 2008.

BizTalk Admin Console – The BizTalk Admin console has many new options in the “search for” list. The HAT utility is no longer included in the “Start Programs” BizTalk tools. Instead, you would go to the BT Admin Console. And finally, tracked messages can be viewed from the utility itself (without being saved to disk).

Properties in Visual Studio BizTalk Projects – BizTalk projects now are handled more like regular C# projects. This is where you specify the strong key file, the application name, etc…

Schemas and pipelines now have .cs code, as orchestrations have in BT2006:

When you look at map propertiies, you now see them in the properties window, instead of the pop-up box.

Windows 2008 and SQL 2008

Somewhat unrelated, the Windows 2008 Task Manger now allows you to start and stop services (such as BizTalk and SSO). But “Restart” not available.

SQL 2008 – when you right-click a table, you can no longer open the entire table, you can “Select Top 1000 rows” or “Edit the top 200 rows”:

Also check out our video discussion about BT2009 Beta:
BizTalk 2009 – Video Interview