Today's enterprise applications demand high levels of reliability,
scalability, availability, and interoperability. These demands have fueled
the growth of complex service-oriented architectures (SOA) built on industry
standards such as Web services and XML-based messages. The added complexity
of these types of applications has increased the requirement for powerful
tools and platforms.
With the release of BizTalk Server 2004 Microsoft has provided a powerful,
cost-effective platform for developing and implementing message-based
architectures, B2B applications, and enterprise application integration (EAI)
projects. BizTalk tools are hosted within Visual Studio .NET, so applications
can now leverage the full power of the .NET Framework, providing nearly
endless extensibility.
In this article we will look at the components of BizTalk Server 2004 that
are required to... (more)