Book Review: SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 by Richard Seroter

Posted: May 5, 2009  |  Categories: BizTalk Uncategorized
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I have been contacted by Packt Publishing to post a blog review of Richard Seroter’s book ‘SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009’. They have kindly provided me with the electronic copy while a printed copy I ordered a while ago makes its way to New Zealand.

The author Richard Seroter is a several times Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server and a Microsoft Connected Systems Advisor. He has a very informative and active blog, presents frequently at user groups, and published a series of posts on TOPXML.com about WCF and BizTalk Server.

The book SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009, as I have mentioned earlier, has been much anticipated by the BizTalk community. It covers some hot topics like implementing Service Oriented Architecture with BizTalk and the Enterprise Service Bus Guidance 2.0. But it goes far beyond this, providing much sought after guidance around WCF, BizTalk communication patterns, messaging, orchestrations, versioning, UDDI, and the new WCF based SQL adapter.

If you follow Richard’s blog you will be glad to know that the book is as absorbing and effortless to read, full of real life examples and code samples.

Chapter 1 gives an overview of BizTalk Server, how it has been used for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business (B2B) integration, Business Process Management (BPM), and how the foundations of these can be applied to Service Oriented Architecture. Richard in this chapter also covers the basic architecture of BizTalk, and the main artefacts that compose it.

Chapters 2 and 3 go over Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and BizTalk Server and how they work together to provide powerful BizTalk backed WCF services, as well as consuming WCF services from BizTalk. It has many details around the WCF adapters that you will find nowhere else, like an overview of the WSDL of a WCF service and how it relates to values populated in the WCF Publishing Wizard.

Chapter 4 will appeal to those architecting BizTalk solutions, as it goes over the principles of service oriented architecture and how they apply to BizTalk Server. This is one of my favourite chapters in the book.

Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 will take you through a wild ride of hands on Service Oriented patterns and best practices implemented with BizTalk Server. Each chapter covers a different topic: Schemas and Endpoints, Asynchronous Communication, Orchestration, and Versioning.

Chapter 9 covers the new WCF SQL Adapter that is part of the BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0. Richard covers several scenarios with the new adapter, including query notifications and using the adapter without BizTalk.

Chapter 10 is all about UDDI 3.0 that comes with BizTalk Server Server 2009, and how to use it to publish metadata about your services. This topic will get more coverage in the future given Microsoft’s drive to have BizTalk playing a big role in their SOA offerings and their move of UDDI from Windows Server to BizTalk.

Chapter 11 covers the much improved ESB Guidance 2.0. Richard gives a great overview of what’s offered in this version of the guidance pack, an goes over three scenarios of increasing complexity.

Chapter 12, the last chapter of the book, contains a quick insight into how BizTalk relates to Dublin, .NET Services and Oslo. I can see this topic becoming another book or at least a few blog posts after these technologies mature. I have no doubt they will be compared to BizTalk many times over in the coming years.

In summary this is a must have book for new and aspiring BizTalk and SOA solutions architects and developers alike. It should be referred back to at the beginning of any new BizTalk and SOA project.

The book can be purchased from Packt Publishing and Amazon. As a gift to those who have read this review, here is a PDF of Chapter 9: “WCF SQL Server Adapter”. Enjoy!

–Thiago

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