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BizTalk and WinFX (oh, I mean .NET 3.0!)

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There certainly been a lot going on around here. We've renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0, we've announced the R2 version of BizTalk 2006 and we've had one of our founders announce plans to transition out of his fulltime role. I had planned to drill down a bit into the first two items. With regards to the last item, I'll simply wish Bill all the luck in the world with a very noble cause.

So, WinFX is from now on going to be known as .NET 3.0. There's been a small firestorm of debate around this to a certain extent and I can understand why. However, I really believe that it's just a name and our time will be better spent in by trying to understand who the technologies contained within .NET 3.0 are going to be able to help development teams businesses.

So with that in mind, what is .NET 3.0 going to mean to BizTalk and BizTalk developers? Well, this question allows me to segway nicely into the recent release about BizTalk 2006 R2. The major changes that you're going to be seeing with R2 (slated for the first half of 2007!) are:

  1. New capabilities for addressing concerns in the manufacturing and retail verticals. I'll talk about this in a later post.
  2. Close alignment with Office 2007 and .NET 3.0. Let’s take a closer look at this one.

You'll need to be aware of three key areas of BizTalk that are going to be affected by this "alignment"

The thing is that R2 is going to be shipping with a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) adapter included out of the box. This will allow BizTalk to connect to any WCF enabled application.

The second thing you should be aware of is that we're going to be releasing an extension to the WCF called the WinFX Adapter Framework (AF). This is a new framework that will allow for easier and simpler developer of WCF based adapters. You're probably asking, "What's the different between this and the BizTalk Adapter Framework". We'll, adapters built using the BAF can only be used by BizTalk whereas adapters built using AF can be used by any Windows application. Your adapters are no longer going to be limited to a single product. Some of you might now be asking, "If BizTalk has it's own adapter framework, how will it be able to use these new AF based adapters?" We'll that new WCF adapter that I spoke of in the last paragraph is going to let you tie these new adapters into your BizTalk project. Please note, these new AF adapters aren't there to replace BizTalk, they will only provide simple point to point connectivity. You're still going to need BizTalk for handling complex scenarios like process orchestration, long running transactions, business activity monitoring, business rules deployment etc...

The third thing that you should be aware of is Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and its impact on BizTalk. WF is our new technology for creating and running any and all types of workflow. Human level workflow, document-centric workflow, user interface page flow and even workflow across a Service Oriented Architecture can all be developed using WF. The key thing for you to understand is that WF is certainly not here to kill or replace BizTalk! In fact, it will allow BizTalk developers to create even richer applications as they will be able to integrate their enterprise level orchestrations with workflow contained in other Microsoft products such as Office 2007 and SharePoint. BizTalk will still be the tool for implementing workflows and orchestrations across applications while WF will be for creating workflows within applications. You might be wondering if BizTalk is going to use WF to power its orchestrations. For the short term, no, BizTalk 2006 R2 is going to continue to use the architecture unveiled with BizTalk 2004. The next version (not R2, the next full release) will introduce WF as its workflow technology.

I know there are going to be an insane number of questions out there from developers, architects and business decision makers. We'll do our best to answer them and I'm planning on addressing as many as I can here. We’ll likely be seeing the usual questions about whether or not WCF + WF can be used to replace BizTalk, but we’ll deal with those as they come. The key things to focus on right now is that .NET 3.0 is going to be delivery new features and capabilities for BizTalk developers. Lets dive into these and make sure we can get the most from them.

Cheers for now

Peter