We covered a lot of ground in this chapter in our quest to discover the key principles underpinning service-oriented design and evaluating how to champion these concepts within BizTalk Server 2013. Proper planning of a service oriented solution goes a long way towards ongoing agility and future return on investment that is critical to defining the success of a SOA.

BizTalk is an ideal tool for building loosely-coupled, interoperable solutions that maximize reusable components. The mix of platform-neutral technology adapters and a foundational message bus based on a publication/subscribe pattern results in BizTalk being uniquely positioned to do much more than facilitate point-to-point application interfaces. While BizTalk supports RPC messages over a request/response channel, we've also seen the benefits we can secure by rotating our thinking and embracing asynchronous messaging based on more loosely-coupled document or event messages.

In the following chapters, we will build on the...