Chapter 3. Using WCF Services in BizTalk Server 2013

The path to greatness is along with others.

--Baltasar Gracián

Now that I've whetted your appetite with a quick look at BizTalk and WCF development, we're ready to start the main course. Let's dig into how BizTalk Server takes advantage of the power of WCF to consume and expose services. We will start this chapter with a look at how BizTalk and WCF complement each other and then explicitly show how to both consume and expose WCF services from BizTalk Server. Then we'll see how to interact with both one-way and two-way messaging patterns and conclude by seeing how to consume services with and without orchestration in the middle. Throughout this chapter, I will demonstrate integration with numerous WCF bindings including WSHttp, NetTcp, and NetPipe.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• The different roles of BizTalk Server and WCF in a solution
• Where WCF fits into the BizTalk architecture
• How to generate WCF services out of BizTalk artifacts
• How to consume WCF services from BizTalk artifacts