In the previous chapter, we were focused on administration concepts that allow us to deploy and manage our applications. In this chapter, we are going to focus on integrating Web Services and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services.

Service Oriented Architecture-based solutions (SOA) have been increasing in popularity over the past decade. In the Microsoft technology stack, WCF has played an important role in SOA solutions. With this in mind, an entire section has been included in the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 exam that deals specifically with WCF.

The WCF framework is very rich and supports many different integration scenarios, including synchronous and asynchronous messaging, encryption, reliability, interoperability with other Web Service platforms, transactions, message durability, and extensibility.

The extensibility features of WCF create many opportunities for both BizTalk and non-BizTalk...