Exploring the architecture of BizTalk Server

At its core, BizTalk Server is a .NET application built upon a set of SQL Server databases that enable it to be both reliable and scalable. It is a Publish-Subscribe messaging system built to achieve the loosely coupled, flexible design criteria of modern enterprise software systems.

Critical to understanding the product is understanding the Publish Subscribe design pattern, which will be explored further later on. Importantly, as most of BizTalk is indeed written in .NET, it really does demonstrate some very advanced and specialized programming techniques utilized to make it so powerful. From stream-based processing (the pipes and filters pattern) to design patterns like unit of work and transaction script; BizTalk really is an example of a well-designed, modern, enterprise software system implemented in .NET. So specialized is the skill that went into the product that the development team actually tuned SQL Server to run in specific ways to improve the performance of the product (which, by the way, is part of the reason why it is unsupported to change anything in the databases, which are carefully and specifically tuned for BizTalk Server).