The .NET framework provides a rich set of tools and an integrated environment to build business processes that link together Web services, legacy applications and mission critical line of work applications.
Biztalk allows the modelling and creation of business processes. Once a business process is created it can then be exposed itself as a Web Service.
Exposing a business process as a Web Services means it is then available to be consumed by other business processes, more specifically it may be consumed by other applications such as Office, Sharepoint or some bespoke Web application.
When configured for Biztalk, Visual Studio.NET contains access to Biztalk modelling tools that allow you to create WC3 compliant schema's that describe the structure of messages involved in a particular business process.
Schemas here are XML files (.xsd) that describe, in detail, the type of information that a message will contain. The fundamentals of communication dictate that there will be at least two messages involved in any succesful process, a request message and a response message.
The Biztalk editor allows message
schemas to be seen as named fields
with the message body (left) and as
the corresponding XML nodes(right).
