TechFest 2006 Developer Track - BizTalk 2006

Dale Michalk, a Process Platform Architect with Microsoft, covered BizTalk Server, and the direction of it's integration story.  Since I have never done anything with BizTalk before, I found it to be very informative.  Here are some points of interest:

  • BizTalk 2006 offers more "adapters" out of the box for things such as Siebel, Oracle, POP3, SharePoint, PeopleSoft, and Mainframe Apps (to name a few).
  • Once BizTalk is installed on a developer's box, Visual Studio 2005 offers specific BizTalk project templates.
  • When defining schemas for BizTalk applications, Visual Studio 2005 allows for XSD creation through an easy treeview-like interface.
  • Mapping interface in Visual Studio 2005 for BizTalk supports "functoids" for transforming logic (which ultimately results in XSLT - and maybe .NET code).
  • Orchestrations allow for business process flow.  In Visual Studio 2005, this is a workflow look-and-feel.
  • If an orchestration project references a schema project, messages can be "typed" according to the referenced schemas.  It also allows referincing of .btm files (BizTalk Map files).
  • Port Configuration wizard in Visual Studio 2005 allows for specifying receiving and sending ports in process workflows.
  • To deploy, inside Visual Studio 2005, right-click solution and select Deploy Solution.
  • From MMC, go to BizTalk Server 2006 Administration, and for the deployed solution, select Configure Application for specifying specific details such as file paths.
  • Right-clicking an XSD in the schema project allows for creating an XML-instance of the schema for testing.

I was rushing to get all the bullet-points in above, as Dale was able to put together an end-to-end (fully functional) Biztalk 2006 solution in less than 25 minutes.  He stressed how he was able to get it all done without a line of code (which was true).

1 Comment

Comments have been disabled for this content.