BizTalk Succinctly®
CHAPTER 3
Developer Environment
Introduction
As you can see, Visual Studio is your main developer tool, allowing you to create applications to be further deployed and installed in BizTalk Server platform. The first time you start a new BizTalk Server Empty project, you might be a little bit lost, because you will be presented with an empty page with no options in the toolbox. That’s because Visual Studio will show you different tools and options depending on which BizTalk artifact you want to create.
After you finish all the configuration items, you are ready to start developing in BizTalk Server 2010. Open Visual Studio and start a new BizTalk Server Project (Empty BizTalk Server Project).
Creating a new project
Available Developer Artifacts
To check the full list of artifacts, right-click the project in the Solution Explorer and click Add and then New Item. This will prompt a new screen with the following options:
- BizTalk Orchestration
- Map
- Receive Pipeline
- Send Pipeline
- Flat File Schema
- Property Schema
- Schema
- Flat File Schema Wizard
Development artifacts
Explaining the Developer Artifacts
You will see the Add New Item screen very often during your development, as you will need several items to accomplish a final solution. I will be talking in further detail about each of these items in the following chapters, but here is a brief overview:
BizTalk Server project artifacts
Item | Description |
|---|---|
Map | Maps are graphical representations of XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) documents that allow us to perform, in a simple and visual manner, transformations between XML messages |
Receive Pipeline | A pipeline that is executed on messages after they have been received by an adapter and before they are published into the MessageBox database. |
Send Pipeline | A pipeline that is executed on messages before they are sent out of the BizTalk Server; they are responsible for making the message “End System-ready”. |
Flat File Schema | Defines the structure of a flat file schema with all the necessary information in the form of annotations in a XML Schema,. |
Property Schema | A property schema is a BizTalk-specific schema that defines field elements to be exposed to the BizTalk messaging engine. The Property Schema is associated with a message schema from which the values will be promoted into the message context. These properties can be accessed by the messaging engine for use in routing, correlation, and tracking |
Schema | This is an abstraction of an XML file, specifying its nodes, data type, and namespace. Defines the scheleton of a XML file such as a class the scheleton of an object in Object oriented programming. A schema might also be viewed as an agreement on a common vocabulary for a particular application that involves exchanging documents. Microsoft BizTalk Server uses the XML Schema definition (XSD) language to define the structure of all messages that it processes, and refers to these definitions of message structure as schemas. With few exceptions, structured messages are the core of any application. |
Orchestration | An orchestration is the visual executable implementation of a business process flow, that is, a logical and chronological set of activities in order to achieve a goal. |
We will now explore each of these development items so that by the time you finish this book you can start developing your own application integration solutions using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010.
- 1800+ high-performance UI components.
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