Effective BizTalk

I recently let my mind drift a bit while working on my book and a few training lessons and began to contemplate this question: what are the core guidelines for a BizTalk solution? In many ways these tenets are the same for non-BizTalk solutions as well and can serve as general guidelines for all distributed application (i.e. Enterprise System) development.

An Effective BizTalk Solution is loosely coupled and operationally flexible. It has clear boundaries, carefully controlled dependencies, and is as simple as possible without sacrificing the previous tenets. The nonfunctional requirements are well understood upfront and documented. Automated tests exist at the Functional and Stress Testing level. Building and MSI construction can be performed with very few simple commands and MSI is the method for installation (that is to say deployment is a clean, self contained, and easily repeatable process).

This is going to be one of a series of posts on the topic I plan to release over the next several weeks. Part of this is driven by what I've seen as a weakness in the community: a lack of direct application of established design principles. Most .NET projects these days follow a now well established set of guidelines and principles that help ensure elegant easily maintainable solutions. These guidelines were established in the context of .NET development; borrowing from and building upon the experiences of older platforms such as Smalltalk, C++, and Java. In an effort to lead the community back to these guidelines I'd like to recover some of these concepts in the context of BizTalk solutions.

Separation of Concerns

BizTalk even more than most platforms is fundamentally involved with separation of concerns (being an integration solution), but often this idea is lost in the implementation of a BizTalk Solution. I think that developers can get so focused on being the separation for external applications that they neglect to keep this principle in mind in their own solutions and often inadvertently let dependencies and tight coupling permeate their solutions.

Layers of a BizTalk Solution

The proximity diagram below depicts how the layers in a BizTalk solution should interact. Only layers that actually touch each other should be interacting in any way. The intention from this should be quite clear; it is to isolate the layers in the solution and minimize their interaction points so as to create a more robust solution that does not allow changes to propagate throughout the system.

This layout will give us the ability to change the solution at its edges or in its core drastically without impacting other parts of the solution. A new external partner schema should have no impact on our Orchestration layer nor on our Internal Schemas.

This can also be expressed in a more detailed fashion in a UML diagram. The following diagram expresses the basic layers (or dependencies) in a BizTalk Solution that follows these guidelines.

Again the goal is flexibility by tightly controlling contact points and Visual Studio can actually help to enforce this architecture in your solution.

So why do this? Some would argue that you could just do a logical separation using solution folders and not need separate Visual Studio projects for each of the packages shown above. While there certainly is some merit to this argument, it overlooks some very important capabilities inherent in this architecture.

For one there is no chance of a dependency creeping throughout your solution, the Visual Studio references between projects will ensure that. Further you can also choose now to deploy you solution in a variety of arrangements of Tiers derived from the Layers presented above.