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  1. What is different between Business rules engine and Orchestration?

  2. When working with Biztalk, does it focus more in drop and click then doing hard coding in C#?

  3. If coding possible, what are you coding? I understand when you are coding a function for instance a pressed button display images in an application but in Biztalk it must be different.

StuartLC
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HelloWorld1
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2 Answers2

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  1. Those two have completely different purpose.

    • Orchestration drives the process - it defines messaging choreography where you can coordinate message retrieval and sending from multiple systems and include some custom processing. The example can be orchestration which waits for Order message, transforms the message to another format and sends it to ERP system. Then dehydrates (waits serialized in database) until ERP system process the order to send some notification back.

    • Business rules engine is evaluation system. Your orchestration can need some decision making which should be controlled from outside. This is what business rule engine allows. Business user can define some complex rule sets including rules like: if Order.Price > 10.000 set Order.Price = Order.Price * 0,95. Such rules can be chained and injected to existing processes.

  2. BizTalk is about developing biztalk project and about configuring everything correctly but it still includes programming. First what you should be aware of is XML related stuff - XSD, XPath, XSLT. Defining messages and transformation is all about these three but BizTalk templates in visual studio make this really easy (for example transformation can be done completely graphically). Next is C# and XLang (some very special variant of C# used directly for expressions in orchestrations).

  3. BizTalk is about developing biztalk project and about configuring everything correctly. BizTalk offers a lot of out of the box features so you can use prepared shapes in orchestrations or you can use prepared functoids in maps but in the same time you can develop your own shapes, functoinds, pipeline components, adapters, etc. Also orchestration allows calling custom .NET code.

At least this was how it worked when I worked with BizTalk 2006 R2 two years ago.

Ladislav Mrnka
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  • Thank you for answering difficult questions. The main reason for asking mountains of question is that I have been requested to become a Biztalk consultant. I have more questions. *What's the most difficult to learn about Biztalk? *How important is WCF in relation to Biztalk? – HelloWorld1 May 08 '11 at 09:32
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    Lol. You don't have even basic understanding of BizTalk and you should be a consultant? What books did your company already bought to you and what trainings will you attend? The most difficult about BizTalk is that you cannot learn it without practicing on real world projects. WCF is important because new adapters are mainly done on top of WCF. – Ladislav Mrnka May 08 '11 at 09:50
  • dude, it's a trainee! anyway, another question: if you would compare between Biztalk and sharepoint, which one is easiest to learn to be productive? – HelloWorld1 May 10 '11 at 19:49
  • If you compare pear and apple which one is more tasty? Those two are hardly comparable but I hate Sharepoint ... – Ladislav Mrnka May 10 '11 at 19:51
  • IC... I also heard that, as a biztalk consultant you also have to work with mainframe. What is your experience from that point? – HelloWorld1 May 11 '11 at 16:08
  • Yes Biztalk is integration platform and through Host integration server it can connect to mainframe as well but I have never used it. – Ladislav Mrnka May 11 '11 at 16:14
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Just to add to the reply from Ladislav...

I've been using BizTalk from BizTalk 2004 through to 2010. There are many BizTalk "Consultants" out there who don't have a clue about how BizTalk really works, when to use maps, when to use C# etc. You need to get some experience using it. There is a useful section on MSDN (MSDN) which has loads of useful information. Also look at EndpointTV on Channel9.

You will need to know WCF as it is important and will become more so in the future. I understand the question about sharepoint, it is quite common for people to ask you to do workflow or user interaction in sharepoint but it isn't an essential skill.

Also learn xslt, I haven't had to do much up until now as I've managed to solve problems using custom functoids or the built in functoids but my current client has some interesting schemas and I've found myself lacking in that area...

Tycho
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