Tony Bernard on BizTalk

I actually wrote our own EDI system in 2 months, plus an integration going on at the same time with a trading partner.  It's only been used for the transportation industry so far, but it's processed at least a couple hundred thousand messages.   The 2 month system was a rewrite of the first time I wrote the EDI system.  The first EDI system I wrote when I was brand new to EDI had an XML system that would map the EDI to a table, and do an insert or update on a table.  It started getting to complex to support every scenario in XML, so I rewrote and the second version is a lot better.

Of course it can't compare with a system like BizTalk, but it's not bad for a pure EDI system.  So there isn't a tight coupling it will use reflection, and load an assembly dynamically and call it to actually do the processing on EDI message.  However, there are objects that the external dll's use to read/create the EDI file itself, for example, to read or create an EDI "compatible" date\time value.  It doesn't have a full GUI, and everything else, like deep validation of every type of transaction set and every segment/offset when creating the 997 response.  The last I checked into BizTalk, the deal killer was having to purchase a license for each individual company or server.

It looks very interesting and complete though.