BizTalk vs. WF/WCF Smack Down

Author writes:- A few months ago I had a great opportunity to help create a sample Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) solution for a SOA Roundtable event at the North Central District Microsoft office. I had previous experience with WF but this was still a challenging experience that gave me the opportunity to learn even more about the technology and when it should be utilized. The purpose of building the sample was to be able to compare it, at the SOA Roundtable event, to a BizTalk solution that had already been created. Both solutions solved the same business problem. The business problem was centered on a service-oriented solution to requesting and aggregating the responses from three airline ticket services.


From a process perspective, a client sends a request to a SOAP endpoint that was actually an aggregation service. The aggregation service, originally built in BizTalk Server 2006, communicates with three different mock airlines’ ticket systems, exposed as three services, over different transports, all of which required different message formats. After receiving responses from the three different airlines, the service then aggregated the responses and returned a single response message to the client application.


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