The question arises with the announcement of Dublin able to makes long running workflow implemented in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) persisted in SQL Store, sounds like Biztalk.
More details at A First Look at WF 4.0, “Dublin”, and “Oslo” http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd200919.aspx
I have implemented BizTalk projects in multinational organizations with industry standard like SWIFT, my personal opinion is, no doubt WF, Dublin and Oslo are evolving technologies in application development, but BizTalk still playing as a strong leader in Integration technologies for EAI and B2B, reason being are
- B2B industry standard like EDI, SWIFT, RosettaNet contains hundred to thousand schemas and only available in BizTalk as Accelerators. I do not think developers can create all these schema parser easily within short time frame
- BizTalk has many built in Network, Data and Application Adapters like MQ, MSMQ, SAP, Oracle, FTP, and etc and all these can be easily tested by BizTalk engineer, without BizTalk, this will need to develop by developers, I believe this is not a difficult task but also not a straight forward task for developer, and how to unit test all these protocol adpaters required sophisticated knowledge, is our developer have all these knowledge to work with different kind of network, data and application protocols?
- BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a good integration analytical tool can be easily implemented by Business Analysts, Administrators and Developers, without BizTalk, can developers built this tool?
- Last but not least, from the business point of view, BizTalk has been sold to many multinational organizations and implemented successfully, will Microsoft stone themselves by killing BizTalk?
BizTalk Server and "Oslo" and .NET
"Oslo" is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. "Oslo" delivers a new integrated platform for connecting across modeling domains, including a new "Oslo" modeling tool, an "Oslo" modeling language, and an "Oslo" repository. As we gathered feedback from BizTalk customers, they indicated they would prefer to take a disciplined, evolutionary path to adopting some of these newer platform technologies. We have thousands of customers that have deployed mission-critical applications on top of our BizTalk Server architecture; they want to decide for themselves when to move to newer versions of the platform.
Therefore, it’s an important guiding principle to our planning efforts that we preserve our customers existing investments in their BizTalk Server infrastructure. In fact, you won’t need to upgrade BizTalk Server to take advantage of "Oslo" – current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers can benefit from "Oslo" by being able to leverage and compose existing services into new composite applications. BizTalk Server today provides the ability to service enable LOB systems or trading partners as web services (using WCF supported protocols), which can be composed with the "Oslo" modeling technologies.
This principle applies to advances in the .NET Framework as well, such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In response to customer feedback, we are committed to continued support for BizTalk Server’s XLANG orchestration technology - the existing BizTalk orchestration engine. Additional support for WF will be prioritized for the coming releases based upon customer demand and scenarios.
