BizTalk RFID for mobile devices

Few days ago Microsoft released BizTalk RFID for mobile devices Release Candidate. This stack has been build on the almost same architecture which has been used in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

The main difference between BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and BizTalk RFID Mobile is that the BizTalk RFID Mobile platform does not have a separate service to interact with a device. This is reasonable, because mobile stack does not have a support for service infrastructure.

Instead, the entire RFID stack is loaded directly in the client's application process. This means that in BTS R2 DSPI providers are hosted either in RFID service process or in the corresponding w3wp process of IIS (depending on installation desktop or server). In opposite to R2, mobile stack hosts DSPI in the application process itself.

Following features are not available on the mobile stack:

• No support for Device groups. The number of devices managed on a handheld device is usually small, and therefore device groups are not necessary.
• No support for Device security. There is no notion of security against multiple users on a device.
• No support for Device versioning. Enterprises often have standard scan and alert mechanisms for checking configuration of the device. Therefore, device versioning is not necessary.

Mobile stack provides event subscriptions. That means, mobile application can receive notification events by subscribing to the event. This is done by using the Windows CE DeviceConnection interface.

TAP users and core partners can download the bits here: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=65&wa=wsignin1.0.