Biztalk Solution Factory

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 !! …