BizTalk - The way I see it! – Part 1
Hello again,
It crossed my mind a couple of weeks ago to
share some BizTalk knowledge with you guys, reason being it takes a lot of
brains for any BizTalk developer to find information on the internet about how to develop
BizTalk applications in one place.
You may wonder, why I shouldn’t
surf MSDN instead of reading this tedious blog !!
The answer is simple, any developer
working with any development environment; he/she “may” ( aka: must :) ) encounter issues
finding a specific piece of info related to this development environment/product. This
chain of posts is aimed to help BizTalk developers finding this particular
piece of info easily by reading a training-like blog posts.
Points Covered:
Thru the upcoming posts, I’ll try to cover
the following points:
- Must-know BizTalk concepts
- BizTalk artifacts
- Schemas
- Maps
- Orchestration
- Pipeline
- Adapter
- Developing Schemas Using
BizTalk
- Developing Maps using
BizTalk
- Developing Orchestration
using BizTalk
- Developing Pipelines using
BizTalk
- Deploying a BizTalk
application
Note: I may add more points,
or add details more than originally planned according to your comments, so
sharing is most welcome as usual.
Who should read?
o
BizTalk developers
o
BizTalk developers wanna-be
o
Integration geeks
Prerequisites:
o
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
(or 2008) and the development of .NET solutions
o
Programming with the .NET
Framework
o
Extensible Markup Language
(XML)
o
Extensible Style sheet Language
Transformations (XSLT)
o
XML Schema Definition
Language (XSD)
o
Web Service use and
development
So, What’s BizTalk? And what’s
the need for it?
Firstly, it’s not fair to say
“Microsoft BizTalk server”, but rather we should say “Microsoft BizTalk server
& technology”.
Why? Because simple it’s
not just another server that Microsoft released, it’s also a new technology,
i.e.: new Integration framework
The need: basically because
computer systems are not islands, they need to integrate. The need for an
integration framework emerged since these systems are different in O/S
platform, security mechanisms, and network architecture.
Microsoft BizTalk Framework: The
Microsoft® BizTalk TM Framework is a comprehensive
XML-based implementation framework developers can use to design and implement
solutions based on a Web Services Architecture. It helps establish a set of
guidelines for the publishing of schemas in XML and the use of XML messages to
easily integrate software programs to build rich, new Web-based solutions.
Microsoft BizTalk Server: BizTalk Server provides the
tools and infrastructure companies require to exchange business documents among
various platforms and operating systems, regardless of the application being
used to process the documents. Using BizTalk Server, companies can easily
exchange documents between applications within their own organization. BizTalk
Server also provides a standard gateway for sending and receiving documents via
the Internet. By taking advantage of BizTalk-compatible messages and compliant
schemas, BizTalk Server enables organizations to conduct business online
effectively and efficiently.
More & more in the upcoming posts, cya then
Mike