Walter Michel commented on my recent entry on the BizTalk and WCF Messaging Models and asked if I had some guesses as to what the architecture of a future BizTalk version might look like in regards to WF/WCF integration. I think that, at this point in time, it is anybody's guess what it might look like, as it is just too early to tell. Honestly, I don't know what it might end up looking like, and I can't even say I can make an educated guess (and there are people with far more criteria for making such educated guesses than me, such as Jon Flanders ). Instead, I'll address the question in a different way, by mentioning what I consider a few challenges I see regarding the integration and other things like that. The Impact of Significant Architecture Changes One key aspect of the whole integration process between the three technologies is what the impact of significant changes to the core BizTalk architecture. Microsoft already went down that path during the transition between BizTalk 2002 and 2004, and while those of us developing BizTalk solutions are extremely grateful for the benefits that the new architecture brought over, companies with large investments in BizTalk 2000/2002 solutions were not so happy. For most of them, going to BizTalk 2004/2006 meant a complete rewrite of their integration solutions, and that can be very expensive, and though to justify to the business side, not only because of cost, but also because of the associated risks. With BizTalk 2004/2006, BizTalk brought over not only a significantly revamped platform, but also a new, effective, and very welcome extensibility model that has been tested with time. That's why the current core product architecture has been good for three release cycles already, and the fact that even complex things like WCF could be integrated without significant changes to it is pretty substantial. A lot of Microsoft clients and partners have made significant investments in that architecture and its not clear how that investment might be preserved (or at least their loss mitigated a bit) if significant architecture changes happen. I'm pretty sure the people at the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft are aware of this, and from my own, outside perspective, I can only say that it seems like a daunting and complex decision to make. Whatever way they decide to go, it's not going to be easy. So, what happens if the complex changes do become a reality? We can only hope that good migration tools are not left by the side; but even with those migration tools, you'd probably be looking at a complete rewrite scenario again for the most part. Messaging In my previous entry, I commented that the current WCF integration in BizTalk 2006 R2 leverages the existing BizTalk messaging extensibility model (the adapter framework) on top of the messaging engine. However, I think that in the long run, keeping both is probably not the best solution. Despite their differences, there's still a lot of common ground and responsibilities
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