BizTalk WCF Adapter Pack - What is it? what are they?

Wow - a BizTalk adapter Pack announcement is looming (ready March 1 actually).

What is the BizTalk Adapter Pack?? I hear you ask.....I did too when I first heard of it.

Quick Bit of History
- 'Adapters' was a term typically used within a BizTalk space and to build adapters in BizTalk was a 'character' building experience where several COM interfaces needed to be implemented (with some of those interface's origins being in the year 2000!)
- for all that dev effort the 'adapters' only lived in BizTalk -land.

Wouldn't it be great to utilise your Adapter from other 'hosts' or environments such as Word/Sharepoint/Access/MS Project/BizTalk/Your Website etc etc....
(this is a very similar case to the initial *.OCX controls that came out. These controls were based on *.VBX which is something written in VB3 and used in the VB3 environment. Access/C/C++ developers had to duplicate the effort if they wanted similar functionality in their system)

WCF LOB Adapter SDK is the essence here.
- with BizTalk 2006 R2 on the scene, it comes with a 'new' adapter and new adapter 'style' known to trained BizTalk Ninjas as WCF Custom Adapter or BizTalk Adapter Framework V2.0
- so the LOB Adapter SDK is:

• Free
• .NET based
• A Framework and VSNET project template
• Allows you to build custom 'adapters'
• Does alot of the heavy lifting for you.
• Search/Browse/Consume WCF Service metadata
• Able to be hosted in .NET/.NET related Host environment (BizTalk could be one of these :-)

Enter the (Supported)BizTalk Adapter Pack - (Help files Here)

So the BizTalk team have been busy building on top of the WCF LOB SDK to provide 3 .NET Adapters (at this stage) which allow connections to:

• SAP
• Siebel
• Oracle - Database

So at this point you can grab these adapters and connect straight away - this bridges the gap between you and those systems.
For e.g. Sharepoint can connect straight away, the BDC can connect, your .NET app etc.

The fact it's supported and ready to roll makes it attractive :-)

Briefly the implementation details is that these 3 'adapters' are implemented as WCF Proxy Clients with a custom transport. Any application using these will essentially be calling a 'proxy' to a pretend WCF Service, where the 'Service' is the back end system with the WCF Transport implementing the appropriate features.

The word on the street about Pricing is that it will be under US$6000 and if you have BTS R2 with SA you get the adapter pack. For the rest of us, you need to weigh up the fact how long is it going to take you or your team to develop those adapters/connectors????. Licensing is per CPU.

Just to re-iterate, you do *not* need BizTalk in any version, any way shape or form to run this - you could run BTS Adapter pack from a console app.