Gerben van Loon

How does BizTalk handle versioning? Because AppFabric and WF4 don't do anything about it.

I agree that BizTalk is more and more positioned as a platform integration solution instead of an application integration solution.

For many projects regarding .NET to .NET integration now there is the AppFabric with WF4/WCF4 alternative and I would only pick BizTalk if there are demands that can't be met using AppFabric.

Als the pricing of BizTalk is off course something to keep in mind.

Well here we go again... we had this discussion several times.

1. Want REAL reliability there is only one choice

2. want REAL scalability there is only one choice

BizTalk tracking is much more performant compared to WF (You know it hops along on a commit of the parent process so there is very little extra overhead)

Lot of people seem to forget that AppFabric is a kind of Buffed Up IIS server. Did IIS 6 or 7 make BizTalk Obsolete ? no it didn't and nothing has changed there.

- The Publish subscribe mechanism is still the only one that I know of produced by MS.

- The queueing stuff in BizTalk is quite good.

- Throtteling happens automatic.

- BAM is still quite unique

- Rule engine is still the most powerfull

- I believe the Context of BizTalk message (all the props Promote etc) is still quite unique. And this flexible system makes BizTalk so powerfull.

And with faster disks (SSD) rapidly becoming main stream, the performance will increase even more. (Although it's quite fast already given good hardware)

And although there is some overlap in functionality like suspend / resume , persistence, i do belive you have to program all that in WF, where in BizTalk it comes by nature. So less coding.

And finally BizTalk is streaming by nature so very performant. Even now I run into problems with performance if I have to call a webservice. The problem is just that BizTalk is calling too fast and too many (you know parallel) instances of a poorly designed/programmed webservice.

AppFabric is service-orientated.    BizTalk Server is message-orientated with good support for service-orientation.   For example, AppFabric developers use code contracts whereas BizTalk developers primarily use schema contracts and annotations.

AppFabric extends WAS/IIS to provide an application server for WCF-based services with service-level persistence, monitoring and recoverability.  It also provides a distributed caching framework.    

BizTalk Server is an enterprise-level integration server that mediates messages between the widest range of systems, services, transports, formats, etc.   BizTalk Server supports both message- and service-level persistence, monitoring, tracking and recoverability together with advanced features for managing performance mismatches (e.g., via various types of throttling), spate conditions, etc.   It is built around a pub/sub model and asynchronous, persisted, transactional message queues.   It has a deeply integrated service orchestration engine and several model-driven development tools.   It provides centralised administration of distributed integration and service orchestration artefacts and distributed hosts.   It provides a wide range of adapters and accelerators including out-of-the-box support for host integration, EDI and partner management, industry standards such as HL7, HIPPA, RosettaNet and Swift.   It provides a Single Sign-On service, a complete BAM framework, a Rules framework including a rule engine, a repository, tooling and a deployment service.   It ships with an RFID-orientated event processing framework.  It offers additional support for building dynamic ESB solutions based on itineraries and resolution features.   It ships with a UDDI 3.0 service directory.  It supports bi-directional flat-file/XML parsing.   It provides a variety of metadata harvesting tools.  It provides good support for WCF, etc., etc.   This is what the licence price pays for.

For the last couple of years, much of our effort has centred on building ESB solutions that utilise BizTalk Server and WCF together.   AppFabric is a great advance on the WCF side and allows us to build far more convincing service bus solutions that combine various Microsoft technologies effectively, allowing us, for example, to avoid the overhead of the message box for certain types of service interaction.   I'm looking forward to seeing the impact that AppFabric (and the new WF) will undoubtedly have on future versions of BizTalk Server, and it's great to see the beginnings of this in BizTalk Server 2010 (e.g., the ability to use the BTS mapper is conjunction with WF services hosted in AppFabric).

I'm working with Visual Studio 2010 and have a workflow where I'm trying to resume a bookmark. The bookmark appears to be getting set just fine, but when I try to run the code below to resume it, I get an entry in the InstancesTable in the persistence database with the SurrogateLockOwnerID field set to an integer, usually this field is null, and I can no longer do anything with the workflow.

Read this article.....empressionz.blogspot.com/.../appfabric-and-biztalk.html.....a little summary about the above points

Hi all,

I realy don't understand why microsoft compete with microsoft.

Instead of providing the market with unified products and integration platforms (e.g. enhance biztalk capabilities), they confusing it.

What should do a customer that invested in BizTalk as his integration platform.

I prefer one integration platform with lots of options, then lots of products with specific option and even some overlap between them.

It has a deeply integrated service orchestration engine and several model-driven development tools and they as a platform integration solution instead of an application integration solution.

I very interested in your post. that is very needful and helpful for the developers. so, thank you for share it.