The old adage about a bad workman always blaming his tools couldn't be truer with technology, and this is especially true with the Microsoft integration stack. Armed with an understanding of the foundations of the .NET framework and tenets of integration, it is hard to find major functional gaps in mature integration technologies such as BizTalk Server, WCF, ASP.NET Web API, and Service Bus.

That said, having the right tooling can make the difference between a functioning and a finely tuned and orchestrated environment. There is much value to be added in areas such as service virtualization, additional decoupling, monitoring, and automated documentation.

In this chapter, you will be given an introduction to the following tools and frameworks and made aware of how leveraging them can help you build an effective SOA: