I’ve been reading “Enterprise Integration Patterns” by Hohpe & Woolf quite a bit lately. The book describes around 60 or so patterns that are commonly used when constructing messaging solutions. BizTalk is mentioned here and there, but the book is applicable to all messaging systems.
Anyone working with BizTalk should pick up a copy, there are a lot of solutions to the problems you will be facing, getting a grasp of how to implement these patterns in BizTalk will give you a strong base for creating a message hub. Unfortunately, this is sometimes not as easy as it seams. BizTalk provides a substantial number of the basic patterns out of the box, but implementing some of the more complex ones can be a challenge, even for the experienced BizTalkers.
I’m going to have a crack at some of these, and post my implementations here. I’ll keep the designs as simple and clean as possible so they can be easily understood, modified, and adapted as required. Feel free to use these designs in your projects, and please post feedback on anything you think is good/bad/ugly.
I’ve also seen few questions on the BizTalk newsgroups that seem to recur frequently, such as how do I aggregate messages/split messages/implement a sequential/parallel convoy. Hopefully these blog posts can provide answers to some of these.
More detailed descriptions of the patterns can be found in the “Enterprise Integration Patterns” book and website. There’s an article on “Enterprise Integration Patterns with BizTalk Server 2004” on the site, which is well worth reading.