BizTalk main concepts and best practices

This semester I'm teaching a course about Enterprise Applications' Integration. We're using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006.

This is a brief concept map of BizTalk concepts:

Shapes
- Send
- Receive
- Construct Message
- ...

Message
- Schema
- Distinguished field
- Promoted field
- Map
-- Functoid

Correlation

Business rules
- Policy
- Vocabulary

You can find more information about this in the BizTalk Library.


I've also recommended my students the following best practices:

1 - Shapes first, connections next, bindings last

This helps to keep the development focus on one problem at a time.


2 - Follow a consistent naming convention

It can be prefix-based (Port_...) or suffix-based (..._Port) or something else. But do use one!

3 - Use small and simple orchestrations to try out components

Use small and simple projects to try out the features of BizTalk. Tutorials are good for the overall solution, but most of the times you need to solve a particular problem at hand, and testing it in the middle of a complex orchestration won't help. Create a test project, try what you want and then use what you learned in the main project.