Book Image

SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009

By : Richard Seroter
Book Image

SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009

By: Richard Seroter

Overview of this book

SOA is about architecture, not products and SOA enables you to create better business processes faster than ever. While BizTalk Server 2009 is a powerful tool, by itself it cannot deliver long-lasting, agile solutions unless we actively apply tried and tested service-oriented principles. The current BizTalk Server books are all for the 2006 version and none of them specifically looks at how to map service-oriented principles and patterns to the BizTalk product. That's where this book fits in. In this book, we specifically investigate how to design and build service-oriented solutions using BizTalk Server 2009 as the host platform. This book extends your existing BizTalk knowledge to apply service-oriented thinking to classic BizTalk scenarios. We look at how to build the most reusable, flexible, and loosely-coupled solutions possible in the BizTalk environment. Along the way, we dive deeply into BizTalk Server's integration with Windows Communication Foundation, and see how to take advantage of the latest updates to the Microsoft platform. Chock full of dozens of demonstrations, this book walks through design considerations, development options, and strategies for maintaining production solutions.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface
Index

How to version schemas


Schemas define the messages that travel between our service endpoints and represent a core aspect of the service contract. As the need arises to reshape our schema to fit changing business needs, it's critical to understand the impact our choices have and strategies for minimizing impact on existing consumers.

What if we have an existing BizTalk schema exposed via WCF service to client applications and decide to reorganize the underlying node structure of the schema? Or, what if we chose to remove existing schema elements and add new required ones? From our earlier discussion, this would seem to be a blatant breaking change. However, if you perform a vanilla exposure of a BizTalk schema as a service, these types of schema changes do NOT cause an immediate runtime exception in the client application, which is bound to earlier service versions.

In the beginning of this book, we talked about the fact that BizTalk receive locations are inherently "type-less". That is, they...