Enterprise Service Bus

I think most developers in the .Net world have already heard about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is the idea of breaking the system into individual autonomous components, each one in charge of handling specific tasks.

A SOA buzz phrase I recently heard a lot about is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
Basically ESB is a middle ware which handles all message traffic to/from the services in the system, so each service only needs to be connected to the ESB and needn't worry about communication stuff.

Microsoft is currently pushing the use of their Biztalk product the the ideal ESB technology, but there are many alternatives, including building your own custom ESB.

ESB is not a silver bullet, using it will not solve every possible problem in a system designed with SOA, but sometimes it may make your life easier.

Here is some reading material on the subject:

Understand Enterprise Service Bus scenarios and solutions in Service-Oriented Architecture (IBM article)

Microsoft on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (MSDN article)

Microsoft's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Strategy (Blog posts of a Microsoft architect)

ESB vs. Biztalk