Who this book is for

There are multiple target audiences for this book. First off, I'm writing this book as a resource for developers who have been tasked with building service-oriented BizTalk Server solutions. Developers will be able to use this book to implement common patterns to design services in way that fosters reuse and encourages flexibility. When developers are tasked with using BizTalk to consume existing services, they can also use this book to review strategies and considerations they need to take into account.

This book is also targeted at architects, who are responsible for envisioning an enterprise solution and implementing the software blueprint. We will cover a variety of ways to use BizTalk in a service-oriented fashion that will help architects decide the best way to distribute the system processing.

As I mentioned earlier, this book is not a pure tutorial on BizTalk Server or WCF. So, I'll expect that you are somewhat familiar with BizTalk Server 2006 development, and have seen a WCF service in action before.

Also, I'll be spending plenty of time using Visual Studio.NET to demonstrate development tasks, so it would be useful if you have used Microsoft's development environment in the past.

That said, I will be providing a brief overview of both BizTalk Server and WCF, so if you are new to either, or both, I'd like to think that you will still find this book a valuable resource in your library.