Back up and restore

Now that we've looked at a simple example of what the WABS API can do, let's look at some of the more interesting capabilities. An essential aspect of enterprise development is the ability to move artifacts between environments. Commonly, an organization or team will have a development, testing, user acceptance, and production environment (and multiple instances of each). This DTAP (dev, test, user, and prod) setup is perfectly possible with BizTalk Services by creating multiple service instances and provisioning them as required. Then, each can be used as desired to manage the overall integration estate.

Backing up a BizTalk Services instance is not just useful to move content between environments, but can also be used to keep a set of backups or snapshots of a particular environment for disaster recovery or to restore to a particular point in time. It is also possible to restore an instance to a different version of the service, provided that the service type is at least...