We shipped the Microsoft ESB Toolkit 2.0 this Summer. This product was formerly known as the ESB Guidance 2.0, and has been renamed as part of the transition over to the BizTalk product team. You can download the Microsoft ESB Toolkit here.

For those that are not familiar with the ESB Toolkit, it is a collection of libraries and tools that extends the capabilities of BizTalk Server 2009 by supporting a loosely coupled and dynamic messaging architecture, and functioning as middleware that provides tools for mediation between services and their consumers. Enabling flexibility at run time, the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 simplifies loosely-coupled composition of service endpoints and management of service interactions. Dmitri Ossipov, the lead PM and architect of the ESB Toolkit gave a talk at PDC that is good introduction to the Toolkit and usage scenarios.

why the belated post? For me this is a classic case study of how an emerging pattern, driven by community input and feedback, becomes mainstream in the box product over the course of 18-24 months. We in the patterns & practices team worked on version 1 of the ESB Toolkit, based primarily on requirements from our customers; we were able to follow-up and enhance the capabilities with version 2, and transition to the BizTalk product team.