Using adapters in composite services / business processes

The WCF-based adapters can be used within an aggregated inter or intra enterprise business process to provide a true business level “building blocks” that reduce the time, cost and complexity of enterprise integration. Think of a composite service that involves the consumption of multiple business functions from different data sources such as creating a custom record that aggregates data from a legacy home grown application, a SAP application and Siebel CRM application. If the target system already supports WCF / Web Services based access, there is a less compelling reason to use (and create) an adapter for that target system (there may be some exceptions).

Using Microsoft integration technologies, the business process models can be created using BizTalk Orchestrations or Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). If you want to host your WF workflow models in the BizTalk Server 2006, read this post. Both BizTalk Server and WF allow the business process (modeled as Orchestration or Workflow) to be hosted as a WCF Service.