Calling BPEL from C#

Thought I'd have a go at calling a BPEL process from C#.  So I downloaded Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition this afternoon and got ready to fight the monster.

Well it turns out that the monster is a pussycat, it worked first time.

I took a simple BPEL process that takes two strings as input and returns a string and a boolean that indicate if they are the same or not.  The appropriate input and output elements are:

        <element name="EqualsProcessRequest">

            <complexType>

                <sequence>

                    <element name="delay" type="long"/>

                    <element name="input1" type="string"/>

                    <element name="input2" type="string"/>

                </sequence>

            </complexType>

        </element>

        <element name="EqualsProcessResponse">

            <complexType>

                <sequence>

                    <element name="equal" type="boolean"/>

                    <element name="same" type="string"/>

                </sequence>

            </complexType>

        </element>

I fired up Visual C#, created a "Web Reference" to the BPEL process WSDL file.  This created wrapper objects for the process and its variables.  The default generation worked perfectly and the following C# code invoked the BPEL process.

      String str1 = "String1";

      String str2 = "String2";

      EqualsBpelProcess.Equals bpel = new SimpleWebClient.EqualsBpelProcess.Equals();

      EqualsBpelProcess.EqualsProcessRequest req = new SimpleWebClient.EqualsBpelProcess.EqualsProcessRequest();

      req.input1 = str1;

      req.input2 = str1;

      EqualsBpelProcess.EqualsProcessResponse resp = bpel.process(req);

      Console.WriteLine(str1+" = "+str2+" is "+resp.same+"("+resp.equal+")");

The above C# could probably be cleaner - this was my first C# application after all. Calling BPEL from C# is really that easy! The wonderful thing about web services is that the big companies have actually agreed on a useful standard.