Introduction

The BizTalk Server 2006 product is a group of application services that facilitate the rapid
creation of integration solutions. BizTalk Server is designed specifically to integrate disparate
systems in a loosely coupled way. BizTalk Server is a toolkit, and within this toolkit you will
find tools to help you build your application. The trick, like the wise Scottish man said, is
“using the right tool for the right job.”
The art of creating a BizTalk solution is exactly that, using the right tool from the BizTalk
toolkit to accomplish the task at hand. If you were to look at two BizTalk projects that address
identical problems, designed by two architects, you would, most likely, see two completely different-
looking solutions. Both solutions would probably work; however, generally one solution
would be more correct because it would properly use BizTalk’s tools as they were designed. This
book will attempt to address how to properly use each of the tools within BizTalk in the manner
in which they were intended. The other thing the book will do is show how each of the tools can
be used to solve integration problems in an efficient way. In reality though, most of the features
within BizTalk are flexible enough that you can generally solve most problems using only one
piece of the BizTalk puzzle.
Since BizTalk allows you to address a problem in dozens of different ways, there is no one
answer as to how to implement a BizTalk solution. To help address this issue of how best to
implement a given solution, Microsoft will be releasing several enterprise application guidelines
for BizTalk 2006 that should alleviate some of this confusion, but this problem will never
go away. This book will build upon those patterns as well as provide some advanced concepts,
examples, and patterns to allow software architects to properly build complex solutions using
BizTalk Server.