Managing Business Processes Using BizTalk Explorer

BizTalk® Explorer is a Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 tool window that displays the contents of a BizTalk Management database. It displays items such as assemblies, ports, and parties in a hierarchical tree. You can use BizTalk Explorer to configure and manage BizTalk projects, parties, and orchestrations.

The primary tool for managing the artifacts in your BizTalk Management database is BizTalk Explorer. BizTalk Explorer enables you to explore and manage artifacts such as receive locations and send ports through a graphical interface in the Visual Studio 2005 development environment. This same functionality is also available within the BizTalk Explorer Object Model, which enables you to generate and manage your artifacts programmatically using C#, Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET, or scripts.

The benefit of using BizTalk Explorer is that it decouples the business logic involved in creating a solution from the implementation details of the solution. A developer can create an orchestration without knowledge of the specific send ports or receive locations; these can be configured later using BizTalk Explorer. This not only enables the reuse of orchestrations, it also enables increased flexibility to make changes without having to change the actual applications.

BizTalk Explorer is a tool that enables you to view and manage the configuration details of your project. Included in these management tasks are:

• Viewing databases and assemblies
  
  
• Deploying and undeploying business processes
  
  
• Creating and editing ports, roles, and parties
  
  
• Enlisting parties into roles
  
  

Note
BizTalk Explorer is only available if Microsoft® BizTalk Server is installed.