How to version endpoints?

The service endpoint is the gateway to the service. Clients who design, develop, and test against services on that endpoint expect consistent behavior. While there are non-breaking changes that we can introduce to our BizTalk WCF endpoints (for example, instrumentation or even internal mapping changes), we want to follow good practices when preparing to introduce new or modified capabilities to our service endpoints.

Let's look at an example here. Assume that we have a business process applied to the Product schema through the use of BizTalk orchestration. Our orchestration takes apart each section of the product and inserts or updates the relevant data into downstream systems:

After deploying this orchestration, we bind its logical receive port to the WCF service receive port that we've created earlier in this chapter. When the business units come calling for Manufacturing Locations to be added to the product schema, we can apply namespace versioning and create a...