When I was clarifying the Microsoft Messaging Message I said I'd watch the PDC DAT 420 presentation on BizTalk and Indigo. As my PDC DVDs arrived this week I didn't have to download the presentation I finally got around to watching it. Here are the key points I took from the presentation:
- From a BizTalk perspective, Indigo is the vehicle that will provide secure, reliable transacted services (over more than just http).
- Indigo is an API, BizTalk is a set of tools. Indigo will natively integrated into the next version of BizTalk after BizTalk 2004. The demos showed a prototype Indigo adapter that worked with BizTalk 2004.
- BizTalk has been achieving reliable services through the BizTalk Framework 2. In future this will be deprecated and replaced with WS-ReliableMessaging, which will be provided by Indigo.
- BizTalk will use the security model built into Indigo to enable WS-Security support for Username tokens and X509 certificates that can be easily configured through attributes, configuration files and policy.
The presentation helped me understand that Indigo is the plumbing. A lot of business functionality will require the use of tools that take advantage of that plumbing, such as BizTalk. So I was interested a few days later to see an announcement that the BizTalk Orchestration will ship as part of Indigo in Longhorn. As the article points out, BizTalk seems to debut features that eventually become part of the plumbing.
I really enjoyed the presentation, and not just because Scott Woodgate has such a pleasing accent to listen to (New Zealand, so similar to Australian with stranger vowels). The BizTalk 2004 health and activity monitor combined with the Orchestration debugger were great features. I can imagine that these would reduce a lot of the pain with administrating and developing complex service-oriented systems. I'm hoping that I'll get to benefit from these tools on future projects.
Suresh Kumar has posted a newsgroup exchange from Don Box and Scott Woodgate that cover most of the points from the talk on how BizTalk will take advantage of the features provided by Indigo. Suresh also has some other good posts on general BizTalk 2004 resources, BizTalk and Publish/Subscribe and XML Web Services in BizTalk 2004 including talk of a WSE adapter for BizTalk later this year. If I could find his RSS feed I'd subscribe.