Essential Biztalk Esb Toolkit Interview Preparation Guide

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Itinerary (also described as "Routing slip") is a mediation Policy which can be attached to a message which comes to the ESB dynamically. Itinerary provides pictorial view of message flow with On/Off Ramp

Yes, in fact, visual studio default option is to enforce encryption. Since Itineraries may potentially contain sensitive configuration information, “Itinerary Encryption”was introduced to encrypt your itineraries with a certificate before exporting them.

Export Mode property can be used to define where the service will execute.
Strict: ensures that the itinerary service executes in its prescribed container; itinerary has a stage property that specifies the pipeline in which the service executes.
Default: the itinerary service executes in the order prescribed, but not necessarily in the pipeline stage desired.

On-Ramp -> ESB Pipeline (ESB Context promotion) -> Itinerary -> MessageBox -> Queue message for subscriber -> Subscriber (Orchestration / Off-Ramp).

We can have BRE resolver to achieve more dynamic routing approach. Rules can be configured not only for transport or transformation but also for itinerary itself.

Yes, you need to add multiple Itinerary Services in sequence to achieve this.

It sets endpoint location properties for the outbound message using ESB resolution guidance.

ESB Toolkit doesn't address to improve run-time performance.

Yes, by implementing IResolverProvider interface.

Using Orchestration Service Extender.

The ESB Management Portal provides views of fault information that make it easy to monitor, manage, and debug ESB applications. It also provides features that you can use to manage alerts, publish UDDI information, and administer the portal. To open the portal, navigate to http://localhost/ESB.Portal/.

Below are are some underline features of ESB toolkit:
☛ > Location & Version Transparency
☛ > Transport Protocol Conversion
☛ > Dynamic Data / Format Transformation
☛ > Lightweight Service Composition
☛ > Error Handling & Repair
☛ > Service Interactions Support

The Itinerary need to be in the Deployed status in order to use it. To verify this, you can either check nStatus column value "1? in Itinerary table or ItineraryStatus column in Visual Studio by selecting Model Exporter as Database.
You won't be able to call the itinerary in Published status.

Yes. It is possible in itineraries.

☛ > On-Ramp is receive location which provides esb context (Corresponds to Receive port)
☛ > Off-Ramp (typically dynamic) is send port with respect to esb context (Corresponds to the send port)

It is a security issue that can happen while doing ESB Toolkit setup in a multi-server configuration. This happens when ESB Portal web application refused to forward the impersonated credentials to the SQL Server since it is on another server. An identity delegation rights should be given to the application pool.

The BizTalk ESB Toolkit provides architectural guidance, patterns, and a collection of BizTalk Server and .NET Framework components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions

☛ Message Routing
-> Message Router : determines the recipient of the message based on a set of conditions
-> Content-Based Router : determines the recipient of a message based on message content
-> Routing-Slip : a message must be routed through a series of components in a pre-defined order, which may not be known at the design time.
-> Recipient List: a message is routed to one or more recipients (static / dynamic)
-> Splitter : Breaking one message to multiple chunks
☛ Message Transformation
-> Translator : Solves the problem of translating incompatible data formats between two systems
-> Normalizer : Solves the problem when messages received from different sources are semantically equivalent but format is different
-> Content Enricher : Solves the problem by furnishing additional data to the received message required by target system
☛ Service Mediation
-> VETO / VETRO : Solves the problem using esb pipelines for Validate, Enrich, Transform, Route, Operate
-> Request-Response: Solves the problem of two-way communication
☛ Service Management
-> Repair and Resubmit: So

An EsbImportUtil.exe utility tool is a good option used to publish or deploy the itinerary XML into the ESBItineraryDB database.

A component which feeds runtime configuration values to the Adapter provider the so that it can dynamically configure the Dynamic Adapter at run-time. It is a .NET component having a collection of entries which tells what values to use for various BizTalk components.
Example: STATIC, UDDI, XPATH, BRE, BRI, ITINERARY, ITINERARY-STATIC, LDAP

2.3

☛ ServiceName
☛ ServiceState
☛ ServiceType

Yes (with some trick), a message created within BizTalk Orchestration can promote properties with ESB context and published to MessageBox.

Because you have chosen to export your Itinerary in XML for moving it to a different environment. Once you are importing it to the targeted environment, you have an option for "Publish" / "Deploy".

Routing Slip pattern is widely used message routing pattern and used when a message is routed through a series of components in a pre-defined order (may be unknown during design time). ESB provides this pattern via Itinerary-based processing. A business rule can be used to select an Itinerary for a message dynamically