While I’ve worked with the exception handling from the ESB guidance 1.0 and read quite a lot about the ESB Toolkit 2.0, I thought I should take a closer look at the ESB Toolkit 2.0 and get my hands dirty.
The first thing you should do is download it :-) and that can be done here. Before you install the toolkit, make sure the comply to the prerequisites:
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003 (except Web Editions) operating system Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 with IIS 6.0 extensions or IIS 6.0 (used for Web services and the ESB Management Portal) Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise Edition, including Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (required on development computers) Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Some are quite obvious, but for example without the Chart Controls the installation will fail.
After downloading the MSI you can double click it to unpack the files, change registry settings and install and register for example the Itinerary designer in Visual Studio.
If you go to the folder where the toolkit is installed (by default in the Program Files folder), you’ll find some more MSI’s. To do a basic setup, launch the BizTalk Server Administration and import the ‘Microsoft.Practices.ESB.CORE.msi’.
Now BizTalk is setup with a new application “Microsoft.Practices.ESB”, containing several orchestrations, send ports and receive ports to support on ramps and exception handling.
Ok so far so good. The ESB in BizTalk is setup, but the toolkit relies heavily on WCF services and they aren’t setup yet. To do this use the “ESBConfigurationTool.exe”. It is located in the ‘bin’ folder of the location the ESB Toolkit 2.0 is installed. You can setup the both the Exception Management database and webservice and the ESB core components there. The Core components are the Itinerary Database and the core webservices like the resolver, transformation and itinerary services.
So we’re ready to start with the so called itineraries but what are they? In chapter 11 of the book SOA patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 Richard Seroter writes: “An itinerary is a set of instructions which outline a sequence of services that the bus should perform on a given message”. Another interesting thing is that they “attach to the message itself and do not require any deployment to the BizTalk environment”.
Ok, we now know what they are but how does it work? The key thing is that the itineraries are attached to the message when it enters BizTalk. This is done by a pipeline component in the on ramp. Then the steps in the itinerary are executed one by one and after every step the message is send to the messagebox again. This makes itineraries a very decoupled way of messaging because BizTalk is unaware.
So far the getting started. For itinerary design and tooling also this video by Brian Loesgen is worth watching.