BizTalk WCF Endpoints in Dublin?

Question

 Hi,
 
I've been involved in a few BizTalk vs. Dublin debates in the past week, but not had a chance to talk about BizTalk + Dublin.

As a long time BizTalk guy, I see some major advantages of using Dublin in some scenarios. I was aslo thinking that Dublin could make a good host for WCR endpoints that publsh to the message box database. At present BizTalk publishes WCF services to IIS for HTTP protocols. It would be great to have BizTalk publish WCF endpoints to Dublin, and be able to leverage the functionality Dublin provides.

Has any one else considered this a good option, and is it a workable scenario for BizTalk 2009?

Regars,

Alan

Answer 1

I am not a BizTalk expert but all WCF services that are deployed to IIS should be visible to the Dublin tools. That said the Dublin functionality that applies to WCF services developed with .Net 3.0/3.5 is limited. We are looking to enhance that set and we would be happy to hear from you what are the things that are most critical for you to get in Dublin v1 for managing WCF 3.0/3.5 services.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Hello Alan,

A bit of clarification about Dublin here. Dublin isn't a new host. Dublin is a set of extensions around the Windows Process Activation Service ("WAS") / IIS host that we have today in IIS 7 and beyond.

So, when you use BizTalk's WCF Publishing Wizard you publish your WCF services into WAS, and, thus, into the Dublin environment. There's no difference. As George, mentioned, though, the value that Dublin adds to your services will be limited because BizTalk (2006 R2 and 2009) publishes .Net 3.0/3.5 services, and Dublin is being built to target .Net 4.0.

Even if the service you published from BizTalk into WAS had full Dublin support this really wouldn't buy you much. You would have already used BizTalk tools to configure the WCF endpoints, and you would be persisting to the BizTalk MessageBox.

Dublin would see your service as a stateless WCF service. For this type of service we're expecting Dublin to provide features that:

• Help you configure the service, including persistence, bindings, security, etc. You wouldn't need this since you've used BizTalk to configure the service.
• Allow you to package up the application from one machine and copy to another. This may or may not be of value to you in the BizTalk case. With BizTalk you have a similar packaging capability (export/import applications).
• Allow you to monitor your service; for example, you could capture the service start/stop service events. You have this functionality in BizTalk with BAM. While you could use Dublin's monitoring you'd most likely want to have an integrated monitoring experience so you would continue to use BAM.

So you won’t get a lot of additional value just by hosting your BizTalk WCF service in the Dublin environment. What will be interesting is to see the types of solutions that will bridge Dublin and BizTalk. I haven’t sketched out any of these yet, and I’d love to hear your ideas. One could image a Dublin hosted service that provides low latency messaging (since messages don’t have to go through the database) and connects to BizTalk for pub-sub or for advanced integration features like EDI. WCF is the natural integration point between Dublin and BizTalk.

 

Answer 3

Chris, you are correct about BizTalk not supporting Dublin - the releases are out of synch anyway. BizTalk 2006 R2 and 2009 Beta do not actually support the full version of IIS 7 easier (requiring the backward compatibility) so there would need to be a refresh of BizTalk to be compatible with Dublin (so 3-4 years down the road).
 
The BizTalk packaging capabilities are very helpful - like import a config file to get the WCF settings - this is really nice. It would be nice to have integrated monitoring so you could extend the BAM investments a little. Like being able to swap in a BizTalk tracking profile rather than a WF tracking profile, or vice versa.

Thanks,

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Answer 4

Hi Ben,

As BizTalk creates the C# files when you publish as a WCF service, it may be possible to recompile the services with the .net 4.0 compiler.

This means you should get the monitoring capabilities that Dublin provides for "regular" (SVC, Interface, Class) .net 4.0 WCF services.

If you have a set of, say, 20 services, with five that are BizTalk endpoints it would allow you to view tracking for all the endpoints.

Alan

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Answer 5

That's really interesting Alan, I guess I had not thought of that approach. It would be nice to know when we can use a BizTalk project in the same solution as a Dublin project so you could integrate all of the compiles. I tried installing the 2009 beta on the VS 2010 CTP VPC and the BizTalk extensions will not install - back to this problem again of VS compatibility we have had with 2006 R2 and VS 2008.

Thanks,

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If this answers your question, please use the "Answer" button to say so | Ben Cline