Since today Microsoft has released the ESB Toolkit 2.0 (formally known as ESB Guidance 2.0) This is good news, as soon as I got my hands into it I’ll let you know 🙂
The features (cut-and-pasted from Microsoft ESB Toolkit site)
- 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.
According to the ESB Toolkit website the source will also be released in the (I hope near) future.
The following links can be useful:
ESB Tookit download
ESB Toolkit documentation download
ESB Toolkit online documentation
ESB Guidance Team blog
ESB @ Codeplex