Hanselminutes is a weekly 30-minute podcast with Web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman hosted by Carl Franklin. The following is a transcript from show number 19 on BitTorrent. You can listen online at www.hanselminutes.com.

If you need to integrate Microsoft BizTalk Server (BTS) 2004 with other applications and data sources, you're going to need some kind of adapter. BTS 2004 ships with a few, including the file adapter and the Web services adapter. Other adaptors, especially ones used to integrate BTS with popular enterprise software, are available from third-party vendors. However, if you need a JMS (Java Messaging Service) adapter, or one that supports J2EE facilities such as JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface), JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service), and EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans), you're probably going to have to build one. This article shows you how to construct a custom adapter that allows BTS to integrate with JMS. You can also use these techniques to construct other kinds of adapters, including ones for Java APIs that come with custom applications, or simply call Java libraries from BizTalk Server orchestrations.

As all architects and developers know, the tenets of service-oriented architecture call for breaking large monolithic processes into more granular, purpose-specific blocks of functionality that solve specific needs, and exposing those as services. This is not really new thinking. Languages have long supported the notion of breaking logic into discrete units. If applied properly, this approach will yield a series of services that can potentially be aggregated in different ways to provide different solutions. In short, this building-the-building-blo cks approach is a cornerstone of reuse. In contemporary development trends, these chunks of functionality are increasingly exposed as Web services.

Overall adoption of .NET surpassed Java last year and we see it continue to grow (Forrester, 5/2004). ASP and ASP.NET are used by more Fortune 1000 Web sites than any other platform (port80. 5/2005). Microsoft platform is running the greatest number of mission-critical applications within enterprises (Gartner, 7/2004)

BizTalk Server is often positioned as a means to create a hub-and-spoke architecture. However, the popularity of the hub-and-spoke architecture, the traditional model for enterprise application integration (EAI), is declining. More and more architects and CIOs are targeting SOA (service-oriented architecture), and its infrastructural incarnation: the enterprise service bus (ESB). Does BizTalk fit into this ESB picture?

My Generation is a very flexible, powerful code generator and it's 100% free. MyGeneration executes templates to transform database meta-data or schemas into object-oriented architectures, stored procedures, XML, HTML, ASP.NET pages, and more. Templates can be written in VBScript, JScript, C#, and VB.NET. All four template languages provide the ability to toggle between literal content and executable code via the standard tags.

One of the lesser known or least understood features of BizTalk Server 2004 is Human Workflow Services (HWS). This Web services-enabled platform provides most of the tools you need to build robust workflow solutions. One of the missing tools is a user interface that understands and can work with this great feature.

Imagine that you have built a large enterprise application after carrying out extensive requirement studies. Just before the delivery, the client informs you that some of the business rules need to be changed. What do you do? Modify the business objects? Change the stored procedures?