Book Image

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Book Image

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Overview of this book

Microsoft BizTalk is an integration and connectivity server solution that allows businesses to connect disparate systems easily. In today’s business climate of mergers and acquisitions, more and more enterprises are forced to exchange data across disparate Line of Business systems using integration brokers like BizTalk Server 2010. What is often overlooked when integrating these systems is the pre-requisite knowledge that ERP and CRM systems demand in order to effectively integrate them. No longer is this knowledge locked up in the heads of expensive consultants. Gain an edge within your organization by developing valuable skills in the area of Line of Business integration from this book.This book will show you how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems using practical scenarios. Each chapter will take a Line of Business system, introduce some pre-requisite knowledge and demonstrate how you can integrate BizTalk with that Line of Business system, and then provide guidance based upon real world experience, taking your BizTalk knowledge further.This book will enable you to master how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems effectively. The book starts by highlighting the technical foundation of WCF-LOB adapters and the common steps and important properties pertaining to popular WCF-LOB adapters. You will then move on to an overview of how to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server using the WCF based SQL Server adapter. The book then dives into topics such as integrating BizTalk Server with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, building BizTalk/SAP integrated solutions using IDocs, the differences between IDocs and RFCs/BAPIs, and integrating BizTalk with Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus amongst others.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

ASDK-based Adapters vs. WCF services


One of the frequently asked questions in relation to the new adapters is what is the reasoning behind introducing the ASDK technology? What's wrong with good old fashioned WCF-services that have been used for years to provide access to LOB applications and are perfectly consumable from virtually all applications? Why did Microsoft re-invent the wheel? Well, these are absolutely valid questions and here is the answer. There is nothing wrong with the WCF-services; they are as good as they have always been, but there is one big "but"—only if the LOB application is relatively static. Imagine the situation where your LOB application is evolving and you, as a developer, have to expose new metadata to the client applications? You either have to update existing contracts, or implement new ones with subsequent configuration steps applied to both the host and WCF-service. This has been a major pain for the development teams working on the LOB side.

Note

Metadata is usually defined as data about data. This is a very broad definition; metadata in the WCF LOB Adapter SDK can be defined as the data types and the operations available in the target LOB system. For example, for SAP, it can be IDOCs and BAPIs or it can be stored procedures and data tables for the DBMS-based applications. It is up to the adapter designer to determine and expose the metadata for a particular LOB application.

In contrast, the ASDK-based adapters provide design time metadata discovery and resolution automatically, with no efforts from the development team to make new metadata (or functionality, according to our definition of the metadata) available for consumption. Details of this process are beyond the scope of this chapter, but if you are interested in diving deeper, the sample adapters provided with the WCF LOB Adapters SDK are at your disposal. Take a look at how the Contoso sample adapter located in the C:\Program Files\WCF LOB Adapter SDK\Documents\Samples directory implements the IMetadata*group of interfaces and the magic behind the automatic metadata discovery and resolution will become clear. Implementation of the IMetadata* interfaces does require substantial efforts from the adapter developers, but the end result is certainly worth it.

Now that you are familiar with the architectural foundations, let's proceed with installation of the adapters.