Mike Diiorio

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. ~Mark Twain (or BizTalk Server)

For the past 5 years or so, various technologists have been predicting or even proclaiming the untimely demise of Microsoft BizTalk Server. Usually these predictions come in the form of blog posts espousing the new hotness whether it was a new product from Microsoft or a competing product claiming it was a better middleware solution than BizTalk. Oddly enough, the chatter ramps up the loudest shortly after Microsoft releases a new CTP of technology X that may be tangentially related to an existing product like BizTalk.

In an effort to maintain control over the proliferation of application servers and data, many organizations have undertaken projects to consolidate and integrate systems. One of the first hurdles in undertaking an integration project is determining the most efficient integration technology. Unfortunately, just within the Microsoft stack, there are technologies that consistently cause confusion and are often misused.

During my past BizTalk engagements, I have had the opportunity to work closely with my clients in developing flexible and maintainable applications. One of the most common issues that I come across is the misuse of some of the shapes available within the Orchestration Designer. By misuse, I simply mean to say that many BizTalk developers will drag and drop shapes into an orchestration to implement the business process, but do not take into account the implications of doing so.

In the BizTalk Server 2009 documentation for the topic How to Handle Typed Fault Contracts in Orchestrations, the documentation assumes the reader is calling a web service based on the SOAP 1.2 specification. The code sample presented will not work if the user is configuring a WCF Send Adapter to call a web service based on the SOAP 1.1 specification.