Understanding BizTalk Server and Visual Studio .NET

Integrating Microsoft® BizTalk™ Server with the Microsoft .NET Framework (in particular, with XML Web services and Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET) provides considerable benefit for the application developer. BizTalk Server provides significant support for the development of applications that are widely distributed in space (EAI and B2B) and time (long-running business processes). Visual Studio .NET is a much richer IDE than any previous developer tool, with many more services and facilities available to the application developer. The Microsoft BizTalk Server Toolkit for Microsoft .NET enables you to develop both custom components and XML Web services from within the .NET Framework.

Custom components

Visual Studio .NET provides an integrated development environment (IDE) that is shared by Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET, Microsoft Visual C++® .NET, and Microsoft Visual C#™ .NET. Visual Studio .NET provides access to key technologies that enable the development of BizTalk custom components from within the .NET Framework.

By using the Microsoft BizTalk Server Toolkit for Microsoft .NET, you can create all of the BizTalk Server components in Visual Studio .NET, including:

  • Lightweight AICs

  • Pipeline AICs and encoding components

  • Custom preprocessors

XML Web services

When working with BizTalk Server 2002 and Visual Studio .NET, you can call XML Web services from BizTalk Server, as shown in the following illustration.

Calling an XML Web service from BizTalk Server

Or you can make BizTalk Server available as an XML Web service, as shown in the following illustration.

Calling BizTalk Server from an XML Web service

XML Web services are a key enabling technology for the Microsoft vision of providing great software, any time, any place, and on any device. XML Web services enable a code reuse pattern by which services are made available to an application without being physically collocated. However, this disconnected scenario offers some significant challenges:

  • Interaction among XML Web services. XML Web services provide simplified access to both local and remote business logic. However, an application that is composed of many XML Web services introduces a management challenge: How are the interactions between and across the aggregated XML Web services managed in an agile manner so that new XML Web services can be readily added to an application?

  • Transaction management and exception handling. Aggregated XML Web services provide access to remote business logic, but how can transactions be managed across XML Web services? Also, how can exception processing be provided that requires different XML Web services to be called?

  • Concurrency. Applications should be able to call XML Web services that have no interdependencies—such as an XML Web service that checks inventory and one that checks a customer's credit—in a parallel manner. How can this be achieved without complex threading issues?

  • Interaction with non-XML applications. Application development today involves equal interaction with XML Web services and with applications that are not XML Web service-enabled. How can interactions be managed across both types of systems in a homogeneous manner?

This section provides detailed conceptual information that is important to understanding how to work with the BizTalk Server Toolkit for Microsoft .NET. The following topics are covered in this section:


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