Version 2.5 of our flagship messaging product, Neuron ESB is now available for download.
I’ve talked briefly about Neuron ESB here, here and here and you may have seen Sam Gentile’s excellent treatment of the product here: http://samgentile.com/Web/neuron-esb/. Neuron is the only commercial ESB built on WCF and the .NET Framework that is fully supported by a Microsoft Partner. We built Neuron ESB to accelerate SOA adoption by taking sophisticated messaging patterns such as Pub-Sub, Virtual Service, Naming and Discovery, Mediation, Protocol Bridging, and Security (to name a few) and commoditizing them so that they fall into the reach of developers of all disciplines and levels of experience, whether they are veteran WCF developers or have not yet made the leap.
Put simply, Neuron is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and integration platform built entirely with Microsoft technologies. While specific definitions of ESB’s vary, there is consistent agreement within the industry as to the types of capabilities an ESB should provide; Neuron provides all of these, and more.
Some of the capabilities provided by Neuron ESB include:
· Message routing (content based, static, rules based)
· Mediation (protocol bridging, LOB adapters)
· Message processing (transformation, enhancement/augmentation)
· Management (auditing, monitoring,, logging)
· Quality of Service (security, delivery reliability, transactions)
The diagram on the right depicts a fictional Neuron configuration illustrating interconnections in a heterogeneous environment, as well as the major Neuron functional components. You will notice that publishers publish or send messages to the bus on a topic. A topic is a network, or a channel that constrains communication to a business event. For example, there may be a number of different applications/systems that are interested in being notified with a customer places an order. Topics model the business domain, just like events, so any applications that are interested in orders can subscribe to the topic named “Orders”. The topic is configured with a messaging channel such as TCP which will provide very low latency, high throughput and excellent reliability. However, it will not guarantee message delivery in the event that a subscriber is not available at the time the message arrives. In this case, MSMQ might be a better choice. Other systems such as a WCF inventory service, fulfillment application hosted in an ERP or a CRM application might be interested in new orders, so they subscribe to the Orders topic. Now, when a publisher (such as a POS system) publishes a new order, each subscriber receives a notification. The notification may prompt the application to call a service (pull notification) or Neuron may deliver a message according to the interface of the application subscribing to the message. The latter enables the automation of a business process by orchestrating or composing several services to carry out a business process such as order fulfillment. 
Best of all, Neuron ESB integrates seamlessly with both Microsoft and other vendors. It provides WCF binding support out-of-the-box via Client Connectors and Service Connectors to enable WS-I Basic Profile messaging, WS-* and REST. In addition, it provides traditional integration via adapters for working with SQL Server, CRM, Sharepoint, SMTP and FTP to name just a few. Neuron ESB also integrates directly with BizTalk Server via a dedicated BizTalk channel that enables publishers to send and receive messages via the BizTalk MessageBox. This allows customers to expand the reach of the their BizTalk solutions while continuing to build upon their investments in BizTalk Server. The key objective is to allow customers to continue to leverage their existing investments while streamlining development efforts so that you can focus more on adding business value and less on the plumbing.
There is much more to Neuron ESB than I can capture in this quick blog post, but some additional benefits of Neuron ESB include the ability to:
— Quickly integrate your systems and applications
◦ Insert/retrieve data from databases with no coding
◦ Interconnect heterogeneous systems, legacy applications, and the newest technologies with no coding
— Leverage your existing assets
◦ Utilize current developer skills. No retraining, or special tools required
◦ Use adapters to connect to your applications and systems
— Easily extend your applications
◦ Add workflow with no coding
◦ Add pipelines, with rules, transformation, logic, etc., with no coding
— Gain visibility into your business
◦ Extract basic information from messages for business indicators
◦ Populate data warehouses, and analysis stores in real time
— Create a powerful, reusable infrastructure
◦ Common code is in the ESB, not applications
◦ IT resources can manage infrastructure with no impact to applications/services
◦ Evolves with you, and in support of your objectives
◦ Get monitoring, management, admin for “free”
◦ Utilize industry standards
We are very excited to make this new release available for evaluation. You can find more information about Neuron ESB 2.5 here: http://www.neuronesb.com/default.aspx
If you have any questions, would like a demo or want to talk about some of the key scenarios that Neuron can help you attain, please don’t hesitate to contact me.