When to use biztalk and when to roll your own

I've been reading up on Biztalk recently (i've never used it in production) i've always been vaguely interested/aware of it since seeing it used as part of a demo in the vs2005 launch tour. Whilst i've been reading up on biztalk i've been trying to think about how it would fit into my company's current architecture.

Due to the nature of my companies IT history (which i'm not going to go into here) We have a lot of little self contained applications that essentially move data from one location to another and do some parsing/transformation in the process. In my mind i can easily imagine these being replaced by biztalk orchestrations, then using the admin/portal features to give us a single enterprise control panel to check the health/success/failure of the constituent parts.

but theres a question thats been hanging around in my head whilst i've been thinking about this. What things need to be considered before making the move from a bespoke app to a biztalk orchestration?

 For me 2 of those things are:
 

Performance of bespoke app vs biztalk replacement?

Maintainability of bespoke app vs biztalk replacement?  (is it any more difficult picking up a bespoke c# app than it is to learn biztalk)

 However at the moment, despite my reading, i'm not sure whether i can answer either of these sub-questions
 

Published Thursday, January 24, 2008 3:06 PM by sagey79
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Comments

# re: When to use biztalk and when to roll your own

Thursday, January 24, 2008 10:28 AM by Mike Bosch

I think often the decision becomes more architecture and financial based.  BizTalk is a fairly expensive product when it comes to licensing.  It's also a heavy server application where you need to really plan the physical and technical architecture in advance.  This becomes even more important if you need to communicate with external partners or remote sites.

# re: When to use biztalk and when to roll your own

Thursday, January 24, 2008 11:30 AM by sodablue

If you enjoy spending a ton of money to deliver a solution where if something goes wrong you have no clue what went wrong and how to debug it.

Use Biztalk.

# re: When to use biztalk and when to roll your own

Thursday, January 24, 2008 12:13 PM by Casey Barton

I'm honestly baffled and the continued existence of BizTalk. I just don't see where it fits.

- For what it does, the price is completely and utterly insane.

- Its built-in code is so limiting that you always have to write a whole whack of custom code to support it, and at that point, why bother?

- The visual, click & drag UI for building processes is just silly. This thing is going to support projects that cost MILLIONS of dollars. Somewhere in there you can afford to hire a developer that is comfortable with code and doesn't need to be hand-held (and limited) like a 6 year old.

I think it exists only because it's a product that lends itself to sales presentations to executives where no real technical expertise is in the room. It looks amazing in Powerpoint, and the visual diagrams are understandable to CEOs. The thing gets sold in the boardroom and is then the ultimate boat anchor to all the poor bastards that then have to implement it.

# Using BizTalk vs. Rolling Your Own

Friday, February 15, 2008 6:02 PM by Chris Romp

A customer and former coworker of mine recently sent me a link to this blog post , whose author asks

# re: When to use biztalk and when to roll your own

Friday, February 15, 2008 6:07 PM by Chris Romp

BizTalk is a good tool for quickly building integration applications.  I've done a quick write-up <a target="_blank" href="blogs.msdn.com/.../a> that I hope will help answer your question.

# Using BizTalk vs. Rolling Your Own

Friday, February 15, 2008 7:05 PM by Noticias externas

A customer and former coworker of mine recently sent me a link to this blog post , whose author asks

# MSDN Blog Postings &raquo; Using BizTalk vs. Rolling Your Own

Friday, February 15, 2008 7:09 PM by MSDN Blog Postings » Using BizTalk vs. Rolling Your Own

Pingback from  MSDN Blog Postings  &raquo; Using BizTalk vs. Rolling Your Own

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