What this book covers
This book is put together in a way that encourages you to follow along and build up your comfort level and knowledge as we progress from chapter to chapter. Throughout this book, I will make use of simple pharmaceutical scenarios to demonstrate key concepts. This industry is where I spend my time nowadays, and the demos that we build should have a common theme. That said, if you have no experience in the pharmaceutical industry, there's nothing to worry about. The examples we work through will involve basic "patient" and "drug evaluation trials" scenarios that are easily understood and don't distract from the underlying technology message.
Chapters 1 - 3 are designed to introduce you to BizTalk and WCF and show you how to build a BizTalk services solution from scratch. This will help you keep up with the brisk pace of the later chapters. Chapters 4 - 12 build upon this knowledge and help you design and apply increasingly complex patterns and scenarios.
In Chapter 1, we will look at what exactly BizTalk Server is, review the core architecture of the application, and show how to build an end-to-end solution.
WCF is still a relatively new technology and many BizTalk customers are still comfortably using the classic ASP.NET web services framework. However, the future of the communication subsystem of Microsoft products is WCF, and it's an important technology to understand. In Chapter 2, we take a look at what problem WCF is attempting to solve, and how to actually build and host WCF services.
After having a solid foundation on BizTalk and WCF, we will look at how to actually use services in the BizTalk environment. In Chapter 3, we build a number of common scenarios using BizTalk and WCF services.
By Chapter 4, you will be comfortable with how BizTalk and WCF work, and how to build BizTalk solutions that take advantage of services. At this point it's crucial to investigate exactly what a service-oriented BizTalk solution looks like. What types of services should I expose? How can I exchange messages through the BizTalk bus? We'll answer these questions and much more at this stage of the book.
A critical part of the technology portion of your service design is the contract definition. What are you sharing with the outside world? In addition to the contract, the actual transportation channel is a vital selection for your service. In hapter 5, we will look at building service-oriented contracts and how to effectively work with BizTalk's service endpoints.
BizTalk relies upon asynchronous communication, and in Chapter 6, we will look at how to take advantage of asynchronous messaging to build robust service-oriented solutions. We'll also cover the tricky concept of providing acknowledgements or results to clients that call services in a fire-and-forget fashion.
You can use BizTalk orchestration to design new service logic or, build new composite applications based on existing services that have been discovered. In Chapter 7, we will look at how to build reusable orchestrations, accommodate transactions, and work with service aggregation.
It's hard to build for change but it's a fact of life for every IT department. Fiddling with a service contract is a delicate operation, and in Chapter 8, we will investigate the options for minimizing the impact of service modifications.
BizTalk Server 2009 offers a brand new WCF-based SQL Server adapter. In Chapter 9, we will investigate common usage patterns for polling data and updating data.
Microsoft's UDDI Services have moved from being part of Windows Server to now being included only with BizTalk Server 2009. In Chapter 10, we will take a look at how to use the UDDI server to register and resolve services.
Microsoft's Enterprise Service Bus Guidance is a key part of a service-oriented BizTalk solution and in Chapter 11, we will dig through the various components and build a series of examples.
The Microsoft team responsible for BizTalk Server has an array of offerings on the upcoming slate. In Chapter 12, we will take a look at the role of .NET Services, what "Dublin" is, what's in store from "Oslo", and where BizTalk is heading in the future.