Jean-Paul Smit

The Patterns & Practices team released CTP2 of the ESB Guidance 2.0.

You can get it here.

What's New in the January Release?

This is the second CTP release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. It incorporates several modifications and additions compared to the October 2008 CTP release. The following list summarizes these changes.

New Features and Components

• New core features. This version includes the following new core features:
• UDDI 3.0 Resolver
• UDDI 3.0 categorization schemas
• LDAP Resolver
• WCF-Custom Adapter Provider
• SMTP Adapter Provider
• New and Updated Samples
• SSO Configuration Provider Sample
• SQL LOB Adapter Sample

Changes to Existing Features and Components Modifications.

• Itinerary Designer
• UDDI 3.0 resolver extender
• File itinerary exporter
• Itinerary database exporter
• Resolvers can be executed from design surface to verify resolver configuration via resolver service.
• SMTP adapter design support
• WCF-Custom adapter design support
• LDAP resolver extender
• Additional itinerary model validation rules
• Management Portal
• Chart controls migrated to use Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• UDDI Publisher Utility
• General bug fixes.

Retired features.

• JMS integration

Future Plans

Updated documentation for ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP2 will be released at the later date as separate download. The upcoming releases will contain additional improvements including JMS intergation as well as and general bug fixes.

If you're interested in the beta documentation for BizTalk Server 2009 beta, you can find it here.

Right after BizTalk Server 2009 beta was announced I worked on a virtual PC image to check this new stuff. I installed Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and of course BizTalk Server 2009 beta.

When I tried to create a new Empty BizTalk Server Project in Visual Studio I ran into the exception "The project type is not supported by this installation". I thought it had something to do with my installation so I tried again and again with different settings, but with no result. I couldn't find much about this error on the internet so I suspected it to be my issue only.

It must be something with Visual Studio so I tried a different version, the trial version of Visual Studio 2008 Team System and it worked right away. In my other attempts I used the Visual Studio 2008 Standard edition, so it looks like some part of the installation isn't done correctly for this Visual Studio version.

It took me quite some time so I hope I can save you some time in case you experience the same issue.