With the release of BizTalk Server 2013, BizTalk now supports REST-based services using the new WCF-WebHttp adapter. This has been long anticipated by BizTalk developers as a majority of the cloud-based services are REST-based. This adapter supports both synchronous and asynchronous communications.

When Microsoft initially released BizTalk 2013, the WCF-WebHttp adapter only supported XML message types.

If you were required to support JSON, you would have to create a custom pipeline to convert JSON context into XML. Now, in BizTalk 2013 R2, Microsoft has included a JSON Encode and Decoder pipeline component together with a JSON Schema Wizard for both consuming and sending messages in the JSON format. In this chapter, we will cover only the version released with BTS2013, but we also cover how to handle JSON message formats. We will discuss the BizTalk 2013 R2 features further in Chapter 14, What's New and What's Next?