Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

4.5. Creating a Pipeline Component

In this section, I walk you through the creation of a pipeline component. I've chosen a scenario that will help you understand how to implement a streaming pipeline component. There are several pipeline component samples in the BizTalk SDK, and I encourage you to look at those, also. The pipeline component that I have chosen is a compression/decompression component; it will not have any stage affinity — in other words, it can be deployed to any pipeline stage. That said, typically, I would expect it to be used as the first component of a receive pipeline and the last component in a send pipeline, configured to decompress in the receive pipeline and compress in the send pipeline.

4.5.1. The Pipeline Component Wizard

When you create a new pipeline component, there are a number of options available to you: you could write it completely from scratch, you could take one of the SDK samples and modify it to meet your requirements, or you could simply use Martijn Hoogendoorn's Pipeline Component Wizard, which can save you heaps of time.

The Pipeline Component Wizard can be downloaded from the following GotDotNet workspace: http://www.codeplex.com/btsplcw/.

The Wizard creates all of the boilerplate code that you would normally need to create, and leaves you simply to implement the interesting bits such as how your component will process messages. Once the wizard has been installed, the new Visual Studio template "BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Project" ...