Certificates and ACS

Certificates are required for communication using SSL, and Access Control Service is used to secure the endpoints of the BizTalk Services deployment. First, you need to know whether you need a custom domain for the BizTalk Services deployment. In the case of test or developer deployments, the answer is mostly no. A BizTalk Services deployment will autogenerate a self-signed certificate with an expiry of close to 5 years. The ACS required for deployment will also be autocreated. Certificate and Access Control Service details are required for sending messages to bridges and agreements and can be retrieved from the Dashboard page post deployment.

Storage requirements

You need to create an Azure SQL database for tracking data. It is recommended to use the Business edition with the appropriate size; for test purposes, you can start with the 1 GB Web edition. You also need to pass the storage account credentials to archive message data. It is recommended that you create a new Azure SQL database and Storage account for use with BizTalk Services only.

The BizTalk Services create wizard

Now that we have the security and storage details figured out, let us create a BizTalk Services deployment from the Azure Management Portal:

The BizTalk Services create wizard from Windows Azure Management Portal

The deployment takes roughly 30 minutes to complete. After completion, you will see the status of the deployment as Active. Navigate to the deployment dashboard page; click on CONNECTION INFORMATION and note down the ACS credentials and download the deployment SSL certificate. The SSL certificate needs to be installed on the client machine where the Visual Studio SDK will be used.

BizTalk portal registration

We have one step remaining, and that is to configure the BizTalk Services Management portal to view agreements, bridges, and their tracking data. For this, perform the following steps:

BizTalk Services Portal registration