2009 June | Sergio Del Piccolo

Jun 09

BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 Available

On Monday Microsoft announced the release of the next version of the ESB Toolkit (renamed from the ESB Guidance). The toolkit and it’s documentation is available for download, there is a ESB Toolkit MSDN site as well as a forum.

The ESB Toolkit 2.0 provides key building blocks required for implementing a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) including:

Endpoint run-time discovery and virtualization. The service consumer does not need to be aware of the service provider location and endpoint details; a new or modified service provider can be added to the ESB, without interruptions to the service consumer.
Loosely coupled service composition. The service provider and service consumer do not need to be aware of service interaction style.
Dynamic message transformation and translation. The mapping definition between distinct message structure and semantics is resolved at run time.
Dynamic routing. Run-time content-based, itinerary-based, or context-based message routing.
Centralized exception management. Exception management framework, services, and infrastructure elements that make it possible to create, repair, resubmit, and compensate fault messages that service consumers or BizTalk components submit.
Quality of service. An asynchronous publish/subscribe engine resolves different levels of service availability and provides high availability, scalability, and message traceability for ESB implementations.
Protocol transformation. Providing the ability for service provider and service consumer to interact via different protocols including WS-* standards for Web Services. For example, a service provider can send an HTTP Web Service request, which will result in sending a message via Message Queuing.
Extensibility. Provides multiple extensibility points to extend functionality for endpoint discovery, message routing, and additional BizTalk Server adapters for run time and design time.