Exposing Schemas and Orchestrations as WCF Services

In this section, we are going to move away from some of the theoretical aspects of WCF and actually expose a BizTalk process as a WCF Service so that it can be consumed by client applications. When it comes to exposing BizTalk Services, we have two options to exhibit BizTalk processes as WCF Services:

• Schemas

• Orchestrations

There are a few subtle differences between these two operations:

• Exposing Schemas can be used in message-only solutions and processes that include Orchestrations. A few additional steps, including naming Web Method operations and manually selecting Schemas is required, but you get more control in return.

• Exposing Orchestrations gives you less flexibility when naming your Web Method operations and automatically selects the Schemas that will be used in our WSDL contract. This method speeds up the process of exposing a BizTalk process as a service but provides us with less flexibility.

In order to demonstrate this functionality...