Thanks to all who attended my talk on VSX & Software Factories at VBUG last week. It was a decent turnout considering the last minute change of venue. The slides should be available from Chris Mitchell at VBUG and I’m also posting them here on this blog for anyone else who is interested in the topic.
As I said in the meeting, I will shortly be starting a series focussing on GAT. I’ll also keep a page here with all the best links to VSX & GAT resources and this will be continually updated as i find more sites and posts with information.
Couple of really cool resources that I didn’t include on the slides are
- LearnVSXNow, a great site on CodePlex written by a VSX MVP Istvan Novak. This chap should write a book. I collated the first 10 parts of his currently 23 part series on VSX, into one document and it already stands at a whopping 120+ pages of deep dive content. He uses VS2008 but most of the discussions will apply to VS2005 as well (except for areas dealing with the VSCT file of course – where those of us in the VS2005 world still have to live with the CTC files).
- MSDN VSX Videos and webcasts presented by Hilton Giesenow, Dylan Miles and others.
- The VSX Team Blog - Great content with regular community newsletters and so on.
With sites such as these (and many more others to be put up here shortly), i think the VSX community really rocks. Now, if only we can get more solid information on GAT in this way, the world would be a much happier place (!), ok, so thats being melodramatic 
Anyway, the slides are here : Feedback appreciated.
A quick heads up for those of you UK/London folk who arent aware that the UK SOA & BPM user group meeting for July has been fixed for Thursday the 17th July at the Microsoft offices in Victoria, London. Theres an accomodation limit of only 40 people so if you are keen, then please sign up fast. It will be really cool to meet up and put faces to familar names from the blogosphere.
Code criminals beware… there are a number of ‘cops’ on patrol . . As if FxCop, StyleCop and MapCop weren’t enough, we now have BuildCop.
But seriously, this looks like another nifty tool for a teams arsenal. Its written by GAX Guru Jelle Druyts and his post about it is here. From the blurb on the site
BuildCop is a tool that analyzes MSBuild project files (interactively or during e.g. a daily build) according to a customizable set of rules and generates reports – e.g. is strong naming enabled, are certain project properties set correctly, is XML documentation being generated, are assembly references correct, are naming conventions respected, …
I just came across this excellent material on Technet – the Biztalk Server Performance Optimization Guide. Whats even cooler about this paper is that it goes into some pretty good depth on how to use BizUnit in conjunction with LoadGen to do performance testing. This is really good stuff. I was just thinking how good it would be to see a step by step guide to setting up performance testing, including how to get your solution fully isolated and ready etc and along comes this beauty. Its got a complete configuration file which we can customize and use for our projects.
It gets even better wherein there is an entire section on how BizUnit can be used with the end to end BPM scenario. This is an absolute gem. I remember talking with Gar when we first setup BizUnitExtensions on how good it would be to get hold of the end to end scenarios and setup BizUnit for them and this article provides a lot of that. This, IMO, is probably one of the most valuable articles around not only for BizUnit but also because it describes an approach to testing a complete solution.
Check out the articles and happy Biztalking and testing Enjoy.
Jean-Paul Smit has released a Biztalk Solution Factory on Codeplex. His post about it is here. I joined up on another project , the Biztalk Application Factory a while ago but have been so snowed under with project work that i couldnt really get any contributions there up and running. Jean-Paul also mentions the work done on BASF and Dick Dijkstra who coordinated BASF is also part of this.
According to the blurb on Jean-Pauls blog, the BSF does the following
- Create BizTalk multi project solution structures using a wizard
- Create BizTalk single project solution, grouping artifacts into folders, using a wizard
- Guidance for adding Schemas to a project
- Guidance for adding Maps to a project
- Guidance for adding Orchestrations to a project
- Guidance for adding pipelines to a project
He’s also included source code and documentation. The doc has some screenshots of how to setup and whats available once its setup. It looks really good. I was planning on migrating my Biztalk VS Template into a GAX package and this looks like it already does the trick so i may just use this. It should also be interesting to see how it could be customized in terms of setting up project namespaces etc which my ApplySettings AddIn does. One thing i was going to do was extend my template with a wizard to allow for solutions with multiple orchestration projects and/or multiple schema projects and this tool currently does not do that but then again, that kind of partitioning may only come later in development. Still it would be a useful checkpoint when designing a solution to think about whether we need such flexibility.
Anyway, all in all a promising start. What are you waiting for? Go on and check it out !! …
