What Is a BizTalk Application?

The BizTalk application is a feature of BizTalk Server that makes it quicker and easier to deploy, manage, and troubleshoot BizTalk Server business solutions. A BizTalk application is a logical grouping of the items, called "artifacts," used in a BizTalk Server business solution. Artifacts are described in more detail later in this topic.

The newly designed administration and monitoring tools of BizTalk Server take advantage of this new concept, so that you can manage and configure BizTalk Server business solutions at the application level, and not just at the individual artifact level. By creating an application and adding artifacts to it, you can view, package, deploy, and manage a group of artifacts in a solution as a single entity. Therefore, as the number of complex applications increases you can still manage them individually in a simple and intuitive manner.

There are several tools you can use to create and manage applications, which are described in Application Deployment and Management Tools.

The following diagram depicts two BizTalk applications and the artifacts that they contain.

Artifacts

Artifacts include the following:

• BizTalk assemblies and the BizTalk-specific resources that they contain – orchestrations, pipelines, schemas, and maps

• .NET assemblies that do not contain BizTalk-specific resources

• Policies

• Send ports, send port groups, receive locations, and receive ports

• Other items that are used by the solution, such as certificates, COM components, and scripts

  For background information about each type of artifact, see Runtime Architecture. For more information about adding, removing, and configuring artifacts, see Managing Artifacts.

  An application can contain all of the artifacts used in a business solution or only some of them. Depending on how you want to deploy the artifacts, you may want to place them into a single application or into two or more applications. For more information about deciding how to group artifacts, see Best Practices for Deploying a BizTalk Application.

The default application

When BizTalk Server is configured following installation, a default application named BizTalk Application 1 is automatically created. For information about best practices for grouping artifacts into different applications, see Best Practices for Deploying a BizTalk Application. You can also change the default application or rename the default application.

In the following scenarios, artifacts are automatically added to the default application:

• When you deploy an assembly from Visual Studio into BizTalk Server without specifying an application name. For more information, see How to Deploy a BizTalk Assembly from Visual Studio.

• When you use BTSTask to add an artifact to an application without specifying an application name. For more information, see AddResource Command.

• When you use BTSTask to import an application .msi file without specifying an application name. For more information, see ImportApp Command.

The BizTalk.System application

When BizTalk Server is configured following installation, an application named BizTalk.System is automatically created and populated with common artifacts that are used by all BizTalk applications, such as the default schemas and pipelines. BizTalk.System and its artifacts are read-only. You cannot delete or rename BizTalk.System, nor can you delete, rename, or move any of the artifacts that it contains.

See Also

Understanding BizTalk Application Deployment and Management