MSDN Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 44)

SAAS Connect Enterprise Apps With Hosted BizTalk Services Jon Flanders and Aaron Skonnard Today, more than ever before, businesses require the ability to quickly develop, deploy, and integrate new applications into their existing environments. This growing need for dynamic, loosely coupled applications is one of the primary reasons why many businesses have moved or are currently moving toward Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the new foundation for their applications. As companies move toward SOA, there is a stronger focus on composing systems from the various applications found throughout the enterprise. In this new world, it’s the developer’s job to orchestrate business processes from these various application services that are made available on the network by other teams and organizations, who may be using different implementation technologies or This article is based on a prerelease version of BizTalk Services. All information herein is subject to change. This article discusses: • BizTalk Services as an ESB service • WCF apps on BizTalk Services • Relayed connectivity options • Identity services and token providers Technologies discussed: BizTalk Services, .NET Framework 3.0 44 msdn magazine line-of-business applications, thereby increasing the overall system complexity. Although SOA simplifies each point-to-point connection, composite applications can become unwieldy to manage and somewhat brittle as the total number of service connections required by the application increases over time (see Figure 1). This reality has led many companies to embrace a more loosely coupled and sustainable service pattern commonly referred to as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The ESB model has grown in popularity because it helps enterprises manage multiple service connections through a central bus that provides an abstraction layer over the underlying messaging details. For example, an ESB helps broker differences across services in terms of naming convention, identity management, message formats, and communication protocols. Once a service gets on the bus, anything else on the bus can connect to it, even if it wouldn’t normally be able to communicate with the service directly (see Figure 2). This model introduces a level of indirection between the various services on the bus and between composite applications and the services they consume. ESBs also provide various messaging features including publish/subscribe functionality, which provides for looser coupling throughout the system. With publish/subscribe, consumers no longer have to be directly connected to services anymore—everything just needs a connection to the bus—and nodes can be added or removed at will. ESBs usually also provide a process flow engine for orchestrating the messaging interactions that

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - June 2008

MSDN Magazine - June 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Cutting Edge Patterns In Practice SAAS Concurrency Robotics Form Filler GUI Library Service Station Foundations Windows With C++ Concurrent Affairs Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - June 2008

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