Generating Orchestrations based on templates using wizards and common BTS patterns
This is cool. In a session on the SOA & Business Process Conference, Jon Flanders showed a very nice wizard to generate Orchestrations based on some common patterns.
Here are my notes, and below you can find some links to actual downloads!
The BTS2006 SDK comes with End to end scenarios (realworld type of cases)
- SOA Scenario
- EAI Scenario
- B2B Scenario
- ….
Jon Flanders took the Orchestration patterns used in these scenarios and changed these to become Visual Studio templates (and associated wizards) which generate projects, orchestrations etc. This is in order to have a head start using a certain pattern for your new orchestration.
There's a tool that comes with the download called the Project Template Wizard which can convert existing projects into a new project template. And then you can add additional template pages that can provide some data which can be used during the generation to replace some stuff that you'd like to become dynamic (like namespaces)
The Biztalk designer is always using the .odx XML and turns that into Xlang which in turn is compiled by the Xlang compiler in C#. The wizard uses XSLT to modify the .odx XML and turns that into Xlang. There are enough examples in all the XSLT templates to cover basically dynamically setting things like correlations, schemas, namespaces, maps etc. etc.
This project will probably be posted on Codeplex, Jon's blog, MSDN or something similar. During the session Jon blogged about it and dropped it in his blog. Jon, Krish and Mike Woods are actively looking for ideas like this and any suggestions around this "asset".
Early drop (no docs, use at own risk) : http://www.masteringbiztalk.com/blogs/jon/content/binary/BTPatternsWizard2006.zip
Blog post about it: http://www.masteringbiztalk.com/blogs/jon/PermaLink,guid,d1117ce1-9bc3-4209-9679-5e48bc080e92.aspx
Check it out!