Comments on: The Future of BizTalk/WCF/WF

By: Sam Vanhoutte

Sam Vanhoutte — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 07:17:15 +0000

Nice post Thomas.
I think a lot of guessing will be done for a while, but most of the issues and thinking you have make sense.
I definitely agree on the migration path that is extremely important, since BizTalk is typically used in mission-critical long term enterprise wide projects, and IT managers really need to get this guarantee.
What we are also feeling is that Microsoft is moving more and more BizTalk functionality to the framework or to seperate packages (ie. WCF LOB adapters). Could we imagine to see mapping, pipeline components, flat file parsing… to move to the vNext framework?
If this would be the case the only (but very important!) advantage of BizTalk Server compared to the framework would be the enterprise ready scalable high performant host. (with tracking etc…)
Time will tell

By: Leonid Ganeline

Leonid Ganeline — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:45:53 +0000

Great article!
I think the lightweight MessgeBox Engine in the v.Next is quite possible. It would be really good to support synchronous WCF features. And possible the WCF WS-* security stuff can be implemented much more easily then now in BizTalk.
BTW What about ESS-service? Now BizTalk has not to much to propose on the security area.
Regards,
Leonid Ganeline [BizTalk MVP]
http://geekswithblogs.net/leonidganeline/

By: Walter Michel

Walter Michel — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 16:12:54 +0000

Hi Tomas,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the future BT/WCF/WF. Your article gives us many good things to think about. And you are quite right in that everyone (especially me) should get up to speed on WF and WCF.
I mainly work on EAI and B2Bi solutions. It seems to me that if Microsoft wants to remain a player in this arena it really need to retain many of the capabilities of BizTalk. You mentioned that BizTalk is message oriented. I believe that EAI and B2Bi tools really need to support many message oriented patterns and practices in order to be effective. MS will either have to hang on to BT or overhaul WF and WCF to provide the features necessary to implement message based architectures. I am definitely very keen to see how things play out…
Walter

By: Tomas Restrepo

Tomas Restrepo — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:35:19 +0000

Jon: Well, you know much more than me about BizTalk and WF, and you wrote *the* sample about integrating WF with BizTalk orchestrations. In my book, that makes you pretty qualified for an educated guess

By: Jon Flanders

Jon Flanders — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:31:27 +0000

Nice post Tomas. The part about me is flattering – but I am not sure its true . I’m pretty sure I am guessing just as much as the next guy.