BizTalk Server Project System

BizTalk Server 2004’s primary development tool is a project system based within Visual Studio .NET that integrates the separate tools included in earlier BizTalk versions for developing orchestrations, schema, and maps, and adds a component for developing pipelines. Because the system runs within Visual Studio .NET, developers inherit that platform’s familiar benefits, including support for multiple languages and their associated code editors, source code control, and improved project organization.

This illustration shows BizTalk’s Orchestration Designer, which supports graphical development of business processes, giving developers a simple way to organize and view solutions. The bottommost pane provides a tree-style listing of the solution’s major components (referred to by Visual Studio .NET as “projects”), labeled “EAISolutions” and “EAISchemas,” and their constituent source files (orchestrations, schemas, pipelines, and maps). The leftmost pane (labeled “Toolbox”) shows a list of logical operations that developers can drag and drop into the orchestration design surface—the large pane in the center.