Biztalk Development Leveraging Features And Benefits Of Biztalk

By Author: ryan haafiz
Total Articles: 10
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BizTalk development done leveraging some of its best features can aid companies to reinstate their operations as well as approach to and level of customer service. This makes BizTalk development imperative for companies struggling to create their own identity in the market. Many promising .Net developers and architects can do effective BizTalk application development for them but the melancholy is that there are many developers who themselves are not aware of the core features of BizTalk which can be used for BizTalk development.

What makes BizTalk a complete product? Combination of four different artifacts named schemas, maps, orchestrations, and pipelines make BizTalk a complete product for application development.

1) Schemas in BizTalk development are similar to those found in XML and represent templates used by BizTalk to perform functions like send, receive and process messages. BizTalk Schema Editor can be used for editing schemas in Visual Studio.

2) Maps in BizTalk development act as a convertor and carrier to convert and transform schemas in source format to the destined schema format. They can ...
... be created using a visual tool called BizTalk Mapper which works using BizTalk components called functoids.

3) Orchestrations in BizTalk development are used to represent business processes using Orchestration Designer equipped with a view window where type of orchestration and its properties are set. In easy to understand language orchestration works as a mediator between the code written in C# or VB.NET and its visual representation.

4) Pipelines in BizTalk development work as a medium through which BizTalk Messaging Engine sends message received through the adapter. There are two main types of pipelines named receive pipeline or send pipeline. It is here where pre and post processing happens in BizTalk. Pipeline Editor is used for editing Pipelines.

Artifacts in BizTalk form the framework required for BizTalk application development and integration. Responsibility of each of them is predefined and they together make business application development easier and less time consuming. Editors associated with each artifact are designed in a fashion that they are easy to use.

Some advanced features of BizTalk which can be used for BizTalk development include:

1) Messages from adapters can be transferred from the MessageBox database to subscribers using the messaging engine.

2) Interaction between applications and systems in BizTalk development is done through adapters.

3) Processing and instantiation of orchestrations is managed by orchestration engine which offers like interception, short-term and long-term state management, convoy support, dehydration, feature integration and correlation.

4) BRE (Business Rules Engine) allows a BizTalk developer to abridge business rules with any source code. It can be used for including huge data of complex business rules into the application.

5) BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) is a BizTalk feature which is used very less by BizTalk developers. Display of processes active at the moment and those which are completed for use by the IT administrators and business users can be obtained using BAM.

6) BAS (Business Activity Services) allows a user to create new profiles and modify existing ones that serve as internal or external business bodies. It also allows a user to configure these profiles to be used in a given orchestration.

Tatvasoft has been an old player in the field of BizTalk development and employs well trained developers who are hands on with all the features of BizTalk.