The difference a checkbox can make

I was doing some work recently on upgrading BizTalk 2004 projects to 2006 and had been using the same web services that I had originally published using the BTS 2004 wizard.  I had some changes to make and so I fired up the BTS 2006 web services publishing wizard, not expecting to find much new.  However, one checkbox made the experience worth it.  It said: Merge selected ports into a single web service.  Glorious!  I can't tell you how many times I have had to either create a single port definition, shared by multiple orchestrations, so that I could publish one instance of the port, or hand editing the published web services to get a single service. 

In addition to this one simple change, there is another change that I was glad to see with this wizard.  You can now use the SoapParameterStyle.Bare option to have a little more control over the WSDL contract for your service.  This is especially useful if you are trying to implement an existing interface that requires this style of parameter passing.  You access this with the advanced button on the additional settings page when you are setting things like web service namespace and SOAP header support. 

Additions like these will continue to make BizTalk the tool of choice for implementing SOA.

Enjoy the update wizard, I know if will.