Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

5.3. Summary

This chapter began by introducing the orchestration execution environment and discussing how orchestrations are activated and managed throughout their lifetime by the Orchestration Engine through the use of persistence points and dehydration.

It then discussed how orchestrations are developed, detailing how you can design a business process using orchestration shapes and how complex messaging patterns can be implemented through the use of correlations and convoys. It also described how code can be called from within an orchestration, along with information on transactions and transformations.

This chapter has covered all aspects of BizTalk orchestration, from the fundamentals to the details and, when combined with Chapters 12 and 13, will enable you to design effective orchestrations that make the best use of the BizTalk platform.

Factoring your orchestrations effectively remains the key to a good BizTalk solution. Having one large monolithic orchestration introduces a number of problems, most notably with regard to versioning. Careful refactoring into smaller, discrete orchestrations will make your solution far easier to manage and support moving forward.

The next chapter covers Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which enables you to instrument your entire BizTalk solution from end to end and provides a view into your BizTalk solution for all stakeholders within your organization (developers, analysts, administrators, etc.)