ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP now available for BizTalk Server 2009

As announced by Microsoft at the beginning of this month the Gartner conference,the betas are now available for both BizTalk Server 2009 and ESB Guidance 2.0. For many of you this may be no news, but the good news is that ESB 2.0 CTP2 is coming in the next days and will get a bunch of enhancements and new features.

Some of the new features of the first CTP for ESB 2.0 were described here.

As you may notice, from the below core features list;

• 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

Some of the main features added to CTP2 are:

• Better support of UDDI 3.0
• Sample for using SQL LOB adapter.
• Improved itinerary designer experience (more of this later)
• New Adapters, Resolvers (LDAP, UDDI3), etc (and of course bug fixes ). 

I will write some posts regarding the "Itinerary designer" and the new features added to the upcoming CTP2.

Some of these new features for the Itinerary designer are:

• Pluggable Itinerary Exporters (Inluded XML and Database)
• New UDDI3 Resolver
• New LDAP Resolver
• Test Resolver menu option (to dynamically test a resolver configuration)
• New validations to get more accurate and error free itineraries.

So stay tuned to this blog and the upcoming CTP2 that you may download from ESB Guidance 2.0 site.