What are the advantages of Business Rule Engine (Biztalk) over writing my own rule checker?

Question

I have a requirement to write an application in .Net that can allow business customers to define their own rules. I have been looking into BRE (Business Rule Engine) by Microsoft that comes in Biztalk server. What I understood so far is that BRE provides you a flexible rule composer to drag drop properties from your .Net entity and then assert it against some condition (predicate). However, this is pretty basic and straight forward idea which in my mind can be simply achieved by defining my own domain specific language for writing easy to understand business rules. All I have to do is to create a grammar using ANTLR or Coco/R and an interface where you can write and compile rules and I am good to go. Can someone shed some light on how BRE is offering more and why one should prefer it over custom made solution?

Answer 1

The question's answer really depends on factors such as:

1. The enterprise need: BizTalk is an integration platform and if your enterprise is already using BizTalk, There should not be any question of writing your own rule engine vs BRE since BRE provides most of the functionality you need from a rule engine with great performance, also providing ability to cache long term facts at run time if required. Business Rule Composer provides easy rule building as well as can be installed to business users for composing rules. In some complex scenario, this can be customized as well. These rules you can use within BizTalk using Orchestration or .NET class libraries. So with BizTalk its a great rule engine with lots of flexibility.
2. If BizTalk is not your integration platform and you are considering it only for BRE then you need to think twice since using BRE itself also requires BizTalk license, also using BizTalk product only for BRE may not be cost effective. Something you need to think about.