Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP‏

Last week Microsoft has released ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP:

The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server R2 and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions. The Microsoft ESB Guidance consists of a series of interoperating components that support and implement a loosely coupled messaging environment that makes it easier to build message-based enterprise applications.

According to Dmitri Ossipov’s presentation at the Patterns & Practices conference Microsoft ESB Guidance provides:

• Loosely-coupled messaging environment
• Registry-driven message routing
• Itinerary-based processing
• Logically-centralized messaging fabric

with the following benefits to the customers:

• Higher levels of reuse
• Lower operational costs
• Dynamic business changes
• Collection point for business, service and exception metrics

In his presentation Dmitri defined architecture of ESB Guidance v2.0 Core Engine

Adlai Maschiach describes the main components of this architecture as follows:

• Web services. These expose internal services such as itinerary processing, exception management, resolution of endpoints and maps, BizTalk operations, UDDI interoperation, and transformation of message content.
• Itinerary services and centralized store. These include agents for performing transformations and message delivery. You can resolve itinerary from the store and create custom services that participate in Itinerary processing.
• Itinerary on-ramps. These receive external messages using either SOAP or WCF. On-ramps expose the itinerary SOAP header and perform itinerary processing, using the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.
• On-ramps. These receive external messages in a range of formats and transports, such as HTTP, JMS, WMQ, FTP, Flat File, and XML. They are typical BizTalk receive locations that optionally use the Microsoft ESB Guidance pipeline components and the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.
• Off-ramps. These implement send ports for the delivery of messages using formats and transports such as SOAP, WCF, JMS, WMQ, FTP, HTTP, Flat File, XML, or any other custom formats. They are typical BizTalk send ports that optionally use the Microsoft ESB Guidance pipeline components and the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.
• Exception Management Framework. This includes the exception Web service, the exception management API, and components that enrich, process, and pass exception details to the ESB Management Portal.
• ESB Management Portal. This provides registry provisioning, exception mediation, alert notification, and analytics

This is the first CTP release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. It incorporates several modifications and additions compared to the November 2007 release.

 New Features and Components:

• New samples. This version includes the following new samples:
  • SSO Configuration provider for Enterprise Library 4.0
  • Multiple Web Service Execution Sample
  • Exception Handling Service Sample
• New ESB Web services. This version includes the following new ESB Web services:
  • Generic Itinerary Services ( no itinerary header required)
• New core features. This version includes the following new core features:
  • Alignment with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 ( Beta )
  • ESB Configuration tool
  • Centralized itinerary store
  • Itinerary resolver components
  • Itinerary forwarder pipeline component
  • Itinerary selector pipeline component
  • Itinerary designer
  • Centralized configuration uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Configuration Block
  • Centralized caching uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Caching Block
  • Multiple service invocation using both messaging and orchestrations
  • Itinerary BAM tracking
  • Improved ESB Core engine and itinerary execution

 Modifications to the existing features:

• Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework. This version consolidates the Dispatch and Transform classes to support batch routing of messages within the Dispatch pipeline component using document specification type, and support for itineraries.
• Itinerary caching pipeline component This version uses Enterprise Library 4.0 configurable cache management.
• UDDI Publisher Utility This version supports UDDI3 only with publishing endpoints using publisher-defined key.
• General bug fixes. 

New features introduced in this release are making Microsoft an even stronger player in the ESB market.