BizTalk Server has been around for quite a long time, evolving over the years and becoming one of the most complete and powerful middleware products in the market, helping thousands of companies to fulfill their requirements in terms of Systems Integration.

With such a powerful product and the flexibility it provides to implement integration solutions, it's more than useful to have at hand a set of architectural patterns and re-usable components. These will support our design and help us to reach the most successful result possible. And here's where the ESB Toolkit comes into the picture.

In this chapter, we will have an overview of:

The content within this book is not meant to be a long dissertation about the different architectural terms and acronyms coined over time that lead into the definition of what an ESB is about. We will save you some time by going straight to the point of defining the basics of ESB so you can spend that extra time on enjoying a good BBQ.