ESB Toolkit 2.0 - Is Anyone REALLY ACTUALLY Using It?

Question

We've made a big investment in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 and it works like a dream for all our asynchronous work. We want to do much more synchronous work with it, though, and that's why we're seriously looking into the ESB Toolkit 2.0.

However, I've had issue after issue with this toolkit, and my gut feeling is that it falls short of being enterprise-ready. In other words, there are just too many bits that need to be installed in the absolute correct sequence, and too many things that can (and do) go wrong - too much hacking of .config files to get it to work, documentation full of errors, exception messages with spelling mistakes, etc.

Anyone share that opinion?

Is anyone actually using this toolkit in a live production environment? Have you got BTS 2006/2009 but decided against using ESB Toolkit?

Really interested to hear some opinions.

Thanks

Andrew

Answer 1

We have spent a few years improving the ESB Toolkit, making is useful. We have a SharePoint web part (that can be used with SP Foundation). There are quite a few enhancements. To name a few: Re-submission at the point of failure (instead of the beginning of the itinerary) Friendly XML editor (instead of a string editor) Logging of business data Ajax portal (no pressing F5 all of the time) Visibility into all of the steps of the itinerary (what has happened, what is next) Logging of who made modifications

Answer 2

I think there are many developers and projects out there that found the same issues about the ESB toolkit that you describe. I've seen a handful of projects and companies leverage the toolkit but usually what I see is that the source code is used (not the MSIs and/or compiled code, the source is cleaned up and only parts of it are deployed on the project. I've seen the ESB portal be used the most for its "out of the box" error management features and since its ASP.NET I've seen and been part of extensions built for it. I think it will get there, kind of reminds me of the early years of the enterprise library, in my opinion it only got enterprise ready after 3-4 years of development.