BizTalk : Exposing Orchestration as WCF service

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Overall flow of the solution :

1. Creation of a solution

2. Creation of a BizTalk project in the solution which contains an XML schema & an Orchestration.

3. Publishing the Orchestration to IIS using BizTalk WCF publishing wizard.

4. Creation of a C# console project in the same solution.

5. Addition of the service reference of the above exposed orchestration into the C# console application.

Schema :

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Created an XML schema with 'Status' field as distinguished field.

Orchestration :

The Orchestration simply receives a message from a folder path & the Status

of the message is changed to 'received' & then this new message is send to a 

output folder location.

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There are two messages used in the orchestration one for receive shape & one

for send shape but these two messages uses the same schema as message type.

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The message assignment shape simply copies the input message into output &

then assigns the status field as 'received'.

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After doing all this I'll build this BizTalk project & deploy this project to 

Admin console.

Exposing the Orchestration :

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Our brand new orchestration is ready to be exposed to IIS. We a wizard to

to perform this thing. In visual studio -> tools we have BizTalk WCF publishing 

wizard.

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After clicking next we have two options Service Endpoint & Metadata only endpoint.

We'll choose Service endpoint & also create a receive location in the deployed BizTalk

project.

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After that clicking next we see two options of exposing either schema or 

Orchestration.Choose Orchestration & click next.

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Then we need to choose our Biztalk project dll. 

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After clicking next a receive port is created with the name specified on

the logical port in the Orchestration.

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After clicking next Specify the appropriate namespace for our service.

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After clicking next we have the option to locate our service. We can use

localhost to deploy the service on local IIS server or we can change host 

to deploy the service on any other machine's IIS server.

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On clicking next a WSDL is created for our service.

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After clicking next a new receive location is created in the our project 

in the admin console. We need to enable this receive location to browse

our WCF service.

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Next step is to browse the service from the IIS.

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Our exposed Orchestration service looks like below screenshot.

We need to copy the link in the explorer so that a service reference can be 

added to consume this service.

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After that I have created a new C# console application to act as a client 

for our WCF service calling. Now we need to add the service reference of our

service.

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Paste the URL copied from the explorer & click go.

Our service will be discovered & change the namespace.

This namespace will be used in our client to call the service.

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Now in the client code we create an object of the client WCFClient.

An object of the root node of the schema is also created. We pass the 

appropriate values to this object & call a method which is nothing but the

operation specified on the logical receive port in the Orchestration. Then

we close our client.

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We simply start a new instance of our console program.

This will create a new message which will be passed to the 

logical port of the orchestration & finally the message will be 

processed by orchestration & a new XML file will be created at

the output folder.

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See Also

Another important place to find a huge amount of BizTalk related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki.