BizTalk™ Unleashed

Ports

A port is a conduit used by a schedule instance to exchange messages. An action in the schedule communicates through a port. At a conceptual level, a port is a named endpoint for the delivery (or receipt) of a message from an attached implementation into (or out of) an XLANG schedule instance. This statement, however, is simplistic; it glosses over issues of synchronization, transactions, error handling, state, instantiation, naming, call semantics, and so on. Although a port is just a conduit for a message, its behavior is affected by the implementation behind the port. The rest of this chapter is devoted to looking at these issues more carefully. This section, however, attempts to provide a better conceptual understanding of ports. We ...