Software Technologies

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb973215.aspx
Introduction
With the November 2006 release of .NET Framework 3.0, the wait is finally over for software professionals. The core components of this managed code programming model – Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) – has revolutionized the way software is programmed.

This article focuses on the different options available for communication between WCF and BTS06. While much of the discussion will also be applicable to BTS04, any discrepancies in implementation for BTS04 will be highlighted.

There is a WCF Adapter for BTS06 is available on the CodePlex Web site. An out-of-the-box adapter will be shipped with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 which may be released by the end of September 2007. An overview of the R2 WCF Adapter's capabilities is available at the following blog post. To try out the R2 WCF Adapter, download the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta from the Microsoft Connect site.

However, you may need to integrate existing BizTalk-based applications with WCF to do the same. In this article we present various options to achieve interoperability in cases where upgrading to BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is not possible. The article merely outlines the approaches and does not deal with them in an exhaustive manner. Nor does it provide a benchmark to compare the approaches. You need to evaluate and choose one among the suggested techniques after taking into account the needs of your application.

Note: If you are upgrading to BizTalk 2006 R2, then working with WCF Adapter will be ideal due to the ease of use, deployment and management it offers.