What is BizTalk Server?

In a very simplistic way, BizTalk Server can be considered a message router or broker. For example, when an external system sends an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) message, BizTalk will be able to easily read the message and convert it to the message type that the destination system expects.

To make an analogy with the real world scenario, you can consider BizTalk as a logistics platform for exchange merchandise. The raw materials come into the company and are stored, processed, transformed, and sent to customers. And likewise, electronic messages are received, validated, stored, processed, and sent to other systems.

BizTalk includes a messaging infrastructure, dehydration and rehydration functionalities, more than 25 multi-platform adapters, a rules engine (BRE), the ability to obtain performance information on critical business processes, debug, persistence, and treatment and error-recovery transactions. BizTalk Server is the main Microsoft integration platform, ideal for use with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business to Business (B2B) integration, and Business Process Management (BPM) solutions.

BizTalk is an integration solution that requires considerable investments that might be unaffordable for small and middle enterprises. However, it can be worthwhile when your company starts saving some money. Microsoft has a nice case study on this: AMC Entertainment, by using this integration platform, is now saving more than 2.6 million dollars a year, and it recouped its investment in the solution in about six months for a 200 percent annual return on investment. This case study shows you how this process-oriented technology can help you save money. AMC justified its cost with reduced payments to vendors because it uses the solution to buy its supplies through a 153,000-item online catalog with wholesale and discounted rates, rather than continuing to purchase supplies independently from local suppliers. I recommend that you read the entire case study.

BizTalk Server Architecture

The BizTalk Server runtime is built on a publish–subscribe architecture in which a message is published into the system, and then received by one or more active subscribers. All messages are received by BizTalk through physical ports, called Receive Ports. A Receive Port is a logical container for one or several Receive Locations. The Receive Locations are where you specify the details about the transport to be used, the exact address where the message is to be received, and any other specific properties to that transport type, as you can see in the following figure:

BizTalk Server Messaging Architecture

There are two core concepts behind the BizTalk Server architecture that you should be aware of:

• The MessageBox Database
• Single sign-on (SSO) mechanism

The MessageBox is the heart of the publish/subscribe engine in BizTalk Server. It is made of two components: an SQL Database and the Message Agent. The SQL Database is used to persist all metadata and data surrounding an application such as messages, message properties, subscriptions, orchestration states, tracking data, and host queues for routing. The Message Agent provides a layer of abstraction over the message box database. It uses the .NET COM interop to expose a set of APIs that the BizTalk Core engine can use to communicate with the message box database (publishing messages, subscribing to messages, retrieving messages, and so on).

Single sign-on is a mechanism that provides a way to map a Windows user ID to non-Windows user credentials; this simplifies the way BizTalk can access diverse systems connected to it and how these diverse systems connect to BizTalk Server.

Who is This Book For?

This book is written primarily for BizTalk developers, .NET developers, and all those who are passionate about systems integration. Although integration and BPM consultants mainly use BizTalk, I want to show .NET developers how can they use this platform as another option for their careers.

Code Samples

All of the examples in this book were created in Visual Studio, and are shown in code blocks like the following example: