The WCF LOB Adapter SDK (ASDK) is a set of development tools and runtime components for execution and development of adapters for Line-of-Business Applications (LOB) such as SAP, Oracle, DBMS, and others. The biggest advantage offered by the ASDK-based adapters is that they can be consumed not only from BizTalk, but from any .NET WCF-compliant application using familiar WCF semantics coupled with rich configuration capabilities provided by WCF. If with the previous incarnations of BizTalk server developers had a choice between the ASDK-based adapters and the old COM-based LOB adapters, with the release of BizTalk Server 2010, and BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010 the only option developers would have is mastering the new technology—the old legacy LOB adapters, except the SQL Server adapter, have become history and can't be used with BizTalk 2010. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Understanding the ASDK-based adapter
ASDK-based adapters vs. WCF services
Installation of the BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010
Using the ASDK development tools
The WCF-Custom adapter and SOAP actions
ASDK tools and features
The major goal is to make you familiar with common steps and techniques involved in building BizTalk applications using the ASDK-based adapters, so that in the subsequent chapters, we will be able to concentrate on the features specific to each particular adapter.