Deploying our itineraries

In order to make our itineraries available on the ESB to be used (and more importantly resolved by the components mentioned before), they need to be published into the ESB.

They need to be published into the ESBItinerary database that is created during the installation of the ESB toolkit. That database has a single table that contains all the details of the itineraries, like their name, their version, and the XML representation of their model.

We can deploy them directly from Visual Studio, by using the Database Exporter mentioned in the itinerary properties section. We just need to right-click on the design surface, and then click on Export Model.

In case we export our models into XML files, we can import them later into the itineraries database by using a small tool provided with the ESB Toolkit. You can find the ESBImportUtil.exe tool in the following folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.1\Bin

The arguments for the tool are quite self-explanatory...