Summary

BizTalk Server 2004 is a major improvement over its predecessor, and with the support for BPEL, you can expect a lot of interactions and porting of business processes between BizTalk and other products that understand BPEL. In this chapter we studied the architecture of BizTalk Server 2004 and how messages are processed. We briefly touched upon XLANG/s, Microsoft’s proprietary language for defining business processes. We then delved into the details of BPEL support offered by BizTalk Server 2004 and saw how most of the Orchestration constructs directly correspond to the BPEL constructs. We also saw how to build an Orchestration and export it to BPEL, as well as how to import BPEL processes into BizTalk. We also learned about things we need to take care of and things we need to avoid in order to successfully export or import a business process. We concluded the chapter by discussing Microsoft’s roadmap for the future of BizTalk.