Summary

This chapter introduced BizTalk Orchestration. We started from the motivation for BizTalk Orchestration and followed this with features, terminology, and services of BizTalk Orchestration.

Next the chapter went deeper into BizTalk Orchestration: how schedules are constructed using a Visio drawing tool, what the shapes mean, and how they are used. You learned about the different aspects of an XLANG schedule drawing. Four areas of focus were outlined. We have covered only two of these so far: describing a business process and onehandling transaction failures. We will cover the other two areas on how a business process is bound to an implementation and how you can specify the actual flow of data via message flows as the business process unfolds, in Chapter 10.

The chapter covered the vocabulary of shapes in defining the business process. The following shapes were described: Begin, End, Action, While, Decision, Transaction, Fork, Join and Abort. We also looked at Rules. Here we also covered the exception handling support for transactions, how the On Failure of <Transaction> and the Compensation for <Transaction> pages are created and used. In this discussion, we covered the concepts of how a business process flow is put together and described actual examples provided with the product.