This post was originally published here
Everyone who has been working with BizTalk knows how powerful this product can be. It will allow you to tackle a lot of integration scenarios out of the box, but sometimes you will run into a requirement which can not be handled using just the standard BizTalk components. Luckily BizTalk can be extended on many points, giving you the power to handle all your scenarios. Some of these extensibility points are:
- Ports (Custom behaviors and adapters)
- Pipelines (Pipeline components)
- Mappings (XSLT, Functoids, XPATH)
- Orchestration (XPATH, Helper classes)
- Configuration (SSO Helper)
- Deployment (Deployment Framework)
- Testing (BizUnit, Visual Studio Test, Custom clients)
- Monitoring (BAM, BizTalk assemblies)
- Rules (BRE)
During my time working with the product, I have come to know and love these extensibility points, so when Steef-Jan contacted me to work with him and Johann Cooper on an e-book on this subject I was immediately on board. And today, after a lot of hard work, the e-book has been officially released, and can be downloaded from our friends at BizTalk360 for free. I hope anyone working with BizTalk will find this book to be a great resource.
I want to thank everyone Steef-Jan and Johann for co-authoring the e-book. I also want to thank Sandro Pereira, Mark Brimble and James Corbould for reviewing and helping us revise it into its final state. And last but not least, thanks to Saravana Kumar for publishing it. I had a really great time working with all of you.