Surfacing BizTalk Adapter Pack Adapters (WCF Bindings) as native BizTalk Adapters

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One of the features we’ve enabled in the CTP3 of the BizTalk Adapter Pack V2 (which requires CTP3 of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2), is the ability to expose the Adapters (which are in reality, WCF Bindings) as native BizTalk Adapters. Prior to this, if you wanted to use the Bindings from BizTalk, you had to use the WCF-Custom Adapter in BizTalk, then select the WCF Binding, and follow that route.

With CTP3, there is now an additional way you can use the adapters.

  • Firstly, install the CTP3 of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2, and the CTP3 of the BizTalk Adapter Pack V2.
  • Open the BizTalk Server 2006 Administration Console
  • Navigate to the node as displayed in the screen shot below, right click in the empty space, and choose New->Adapter. A new dialog opens up.

  • Assuming you have the SQL and/or SAP Bindings installed during the installation of the Adapter Pack, you should see one or two entries in the “Adapter” drop down list, “WCF-SQL” and “WCF-SAP”. For the purpose of this blog illustration, choose WCF-SAP. Enter “WCF-SAP” in the Name text box, and press OK twice to close the dialog.
  • In the administration console, navigate to an existing application, and create a new Static Solicit-Response Send Port. You should now see WCF-SAP appear in the drop down list containing available Transport Types.

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  • Click Configure to configure the transport. A new dialog opens up, containing a number of property pages.
  • The “General” tab looks similar to what you would see had you chosen WCF-Custom as the transport type. However, there is one addition. There is a “Configure” button above the text box where you enter the URI. You can click it to bring up a Connection Uri Builder Dialog.

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  • If you navigate to the binding tab, you see that you no longer need to choose a binding. Also, the binding properties are displayed in a more user-friendly manner, with descriptions of the properties appearing at the bottom of the property grid.

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  • The other four tabs (Behavior, Credentials, Messages, Import/Export) are the same as those which appear in the WCF-Custom adapter.

In CTP3, the above is available only for the SQL and SAP adapters. For the next CTP, we plan to do this for the OracleDB and the OracleEBS adapters also. Question – do you want this for the Siebel adapter too? If so, leave a comment here.

Also, in CTP3, this is being done only for BizTalk 2006 R2. For the next CTP, we plan to have this for BizTalk 2006 R3 also.