Microsoft this week made available the 2006 R2 version of BizTalk Server, which it is positioning as key to its delivery of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) technology. New wizards are said to ease the task of creating integration adaptors that can talk to Web service end points.

BizTalk started out a few years ago as Microsoft’s overarching solution for enterprise application integration. It was one of the early ‘business hubs’ to use XML as its main method of communicating. Although use of XML simplified things somewhat, it also brought complexity as well. In any case, the BizTalk developer’s lot in life, like that of previous generations of integration developers, remained fairly unique.

With this week’s release, the BizTalk programmer comes more fully into the world of the .NET Framework 3.0 development. The release includes seven adapters and wizards that help BizTalk Server to talk with Web services-based applications via the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). As well, Microsoft released Enterprise Service Bus Guidance, which provides architectural patterns and practices. There are adapters available for FTP, SOAP and MQSeries, as well as for some prominent ERP packages.

For a tools space that has often been highly specialized, WCF is intended to provide a broader means to achieve integration.

“We see WCF as a generalized framework.” Said Dino Chiesa, director of .NET product management in Microsoft’s Connected Systems Div. Applications that comminicate on Windows will use WCF to perform that communication, he said.

WCF working within NET 3.0 allows developers to use a “universal framework that supports a variety of communication models” said Chiesa.  The models he sees supported include, for example, transactions, asynchronous queues, synchronous methods, security and so on.

Clearly, Web services are just one of many options for integration today in the development world generally, and in the Windows world specifically. -Jack Vaughan

Related
BizTalk rev includes wizard for SOA development - TheServerSide.NET

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under Messaging, Interoperability, Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.