Ports specify how your orchestration will send messages to and receive messages from other business processes. Each port has a type, a direction, and a binding, which together determine the direction of communication, the pattern of communication, the location to or from which the message is sent or received, and how the communication takes place.
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| There is a distinction between a port and a port type. A port is an instance of a port type; several different ports may have the same port type. |
Depending on these factors, a port may have associated with it a URI (a physical location), a transport (either FILE, HTTP, SOAP, SMTP or BizTalk Message Queuing), a send pipeline to prepare a message for sending (for example, by assembling, encrypting, compressing, or performing some other action on it), and a receive pipeline to prepare a received message for processing (for example, by disassembling, decrypting, or decompressing it).
You add ports to an orchestration in much the same way that you add controls to a Web Form or Windows Form. You can also add ports by using the Orchestration View window.