Summary

This chapter explained in great detail how to extend the BizTalk Messaging plumbing to deliver messages to any business process or application.

You have learned how Application Integration Components bound to a messaging port can extend the reach of BizTalk Server to legacy applications. In Chapters 7 and 8 you learned a great deal about the BizTalk Messaging Manager and how to create document definitions, ports, and channels. This chapter showed how BizTalk Messaging provides support and plumbing to extend BizTalk Server by writing Application Integration Components. You learned three ways to develop an AIC—starting from the simple AICs implementing the IBTSAppIntegration interface to more complex AICs using the IPipelineComponent and IPipelineComponentAdmin interfaces. The IBTSAppIntegration AICs are lightweight and simple and suitable for most cases; the IPipelineComponent AICs provide the flexibility of configuring the component differently for specific channels. Finally, we discussed briefly BizTalk Scriptor Component AICs, which are great for testing, debugging, and prototyping purposes. In the following chapter, you will learn how to extend BizTalk functionality using Custom Serializers, Parsers, and Functoids.