Microsoft introduces an ESB for BizTalk

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) will be available for BizTalk around the time of the release of R2.

An ESB, a collection of architectural patterns based on traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) principles, is an often developed solution with BizTalk. Now, a set of ESB related building blocks will be made available to speed up the design and development process.

Officially called ESB Guidance, the new package contains architectural guidance, patterns and practices, and BizTalk Server and .NET components. Microsoft ESB Guidance currently consists of a number of BizTalk projects including:

ESB Core Engine (transformation and routing agents)
ESB Core Services (dynamic transformation, dynamic endpoint resolution/UDDI)
ESB Portal framework
Exception Management framework
ESB Client application
Namespace Resolution pipeline component

Currently, select partners, customers building an ESB and Microsoft employees can download and try the new early access release. The release contains:

ESB Developer Guide
This document introduces architects and developers to ESB architectural concepts as addressed by the guidance, describes the installation procedures for the reference implementation, and explains the functionality of the guidance components through a set of commonly accepted ESB use cases.

ESB Reference Implementation VPC
This Virtual PC image provides a fully functional instance of the ESB Reference Implementation for evaluation, technical readiness, proof of concept, and demo purposes. The MQSeries 5.3 Trial edition and CSD12 can be installed optionally. The installation for these can be found at the root of C:\Projects within the VPC. Once you install MQSeries, then you can install the JMS Pipeline component MSI package within the VPC.

ESB Reference Implementation Redistributable
The redistributable contains installation scripts and .MSI installers for the ESB Reference Implementation components.

ESB Positioning Presentation
This presentation describes Microsoft’s platform value to customers evaluating ESB vendor offerings and the capabilities offered by the Application Platform and the ESB Guidance package.

ESB Patterns Technical Presentation
This presentation provides an introduction to ESB patterns and capabilities as implemented in the ESB Guidance package.

Microsoft ESB Guidance should be released in the 3rd quarter of 2007.