In this chapter, we began to see where BizTalk Server and Windows Communication Foundation intersect. WCF greatly enhances BizTalk Server by providing a flexible and extensible set of service endpoints that are capable of supporting a wide range of transmission, security, and encoding configurations. We now know how to generate services from BizTalk artifacts, whether those artifacts are schemas or orchestrations. We also looked at consuming existing services via orchestration or messaging-only patterns.

Later, in Chapter 7, Planning Service-oriented BizTalk Solutions, we will investigate how to take the implementation knowledge we now have and use it to actually architect service-oriented BizTalk solutions.