MS BizTalk and Enterprise Application Integration

I have been working with BizTalk (with no formal training) quite extensively since last few weeks. We are using this as the middleware for an EAI project. Some interesting things I noticed about it are:

• It looks simple


• Looks easy to use


• Easy to create simple solutions


• Some what complicated to actually make the developed solutions work

The main goal for a middleware in this case is to implement business processes through orchestrations (guess that is the purporse..right?) and transform incoming some vendor application data formats to a standarized data format for the message bus developed specifically for the Enterprise Application Integration Architecture. Once it comes to web services it get a little more complicated, but just picking up a file and routing it through multiple business process based on the content (content based routing) is actually not very difficult. BizTalk is solution development is very tightly integrated with .Net and its very easy to implement .Net classes (specifically XML) in the solutions. You use VS.Net 2005 to develop the solutions by using BizTalk SDK and projects. This compiles into a dll and you can either deploy the solution from VS or just create an application in the BizTalk Administration console and bring in the dll. I can go into details if some one wants that. This is how a simple biztalk orchestration looks like (this is from a msdn sample project):

BizTalk only Talks XML ;-) so you need to learn that in order to actually develop a standarized communication infrastructure for the EAI (i.e. the Communication Bus). From there on its should be down hill. You do need to understand how to design the orchestrations, I would highly recommend some kind of business case -> UML -> Technical Structure kind of approach. Lots of discussions and then ensuring how you will bring in the "Incoming" messages and where to i.e. Message Box or Web Services and how/where these will be routed to i.e. SOAP over http or handed over to another orchestration etc. You can download BizTalk sample from: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/aa937647.aspx. Of course you will find tons of information and help on BizTalk over the internet. Just Google!
I will add a lot more on this i.e. EAI soon...so till then CHAO!!