Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

I heard it from collegues who went to the PDC a couple of weeks ago. But I heard it myself at the BPI & Workflow conference earlier this october. The new workflow designer that Workflow Foundation features will substitute the good ol’ orchestration designer in BizTalk vNext. This means that in the near future BizTalk Server and Workflow Foundation will grow to each other and will make a very strong team in delivering high available and reliable business solution. If only I could fastforward a couple of years!

A few weeks ago Kevin Smith (UK MCS Service Line Architect) released the second version of BizUnit. BizUnit is a framework for the automation of functional and regression testing of BizTalk solutions. Just think of NUnit ;).

The .MSI can be downloaded here: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/bizunit
It has a number of enhancements over the previous version that you can read about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/kevinsmi/archive/2005/07/17/439728.aspx.

BizUnit can be used in conjunction with Jason Births ‘Orchestration Profiler’ to ensure that a solution has an adequate level of test coverage allowing it to be deployed with confidence. The Orchestration Profiler can be downloaded here: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/orchprof

Unfortunately I still haven’t had the time to look at this and to try it out before using it in a project situation. It’s high on my ‘try before you die’-list though.

I don’t believe any of you guys missed this, but about two months ago Microsoft released the first Beta of BizTalk Server 2006. Boy what a lot improvements are in the package. Here a short list of new or altered features:

• Much easier installation (next, next, finish)
• Single mmc for all your administration needs
• Easy creation of deployment packages (MSI generation)
• Single-touch developer deployment
• In order message processing
• Subscribe to and handle suspended messages
• Browse button for file locations (yeah, it still wasn’t there!)
• MOM improvements
• BizTalk API, so no more WMI hell
• Application concept which keeps all your artifacts together
• Some new and improved adapters
• And a lot more

During my attendance at the BPI & Workflow conference early october I had the change to play with this baby for a while and I must say that the improvements really tilt the product to another level.

In future posts I will dive into these new and improved features and explore them a little.

Today I joined the web-log community and will, as many others, post my personal opinions and findings on various subjects, but specificly BizTalk Server. I’m an Avanade consultant working in the Netherlands and specialized in business process integration using BizTalk Server. This means a lot of information on this blog will be about BizTalk. Aside from that I’ll also keep you updated on some of my hobby’s like Windows Media Center, XBOX360 and whatever else comes to mind.

Because I wanted to start blogging sooner I already have some stuff lying around which I want to put up here. So, in the coming couple of days I will submit there posts which will get me up to speed!