3.3. Summary
This chapter covered the core adapter concepts that are key to understand in order to design and develop effective BizTalk solutions. It covered the disconnected nature of BizTalk, explaining that adapters do not communicate directly to orchestrations and instead communicate via the BizTalk MessageBox.
It introduced the concepts of ports along with key but often overlooked abilities, such as being able to configure ports on the fly using dynamic ports and to perform mapping at the port level as messages are received or sent instead of having to involve a BizTalk orchestration.
It then walked through a number of the key adapters, detailing what features they offer to you as a BizTalk developer, and covering the range of context properties that each adapter makes available, which can be key to know when developing a solution. It also provided step-by-step instructions for a few key adapters.
Chapter 4 will cover the next step in the journey that a message takes through the BizTalk architecture: pipelines. Pipelines are invoked following adapter processing for in-bound messages and are invoked before an adapter for outbound messages.
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