BizUnit Snippets Redux (and BizUnit 4)

BizUnit meets XAML

So, Kevin has got round to making an alpha release of BizUnit v4. This time the steps are all in XAML which i think should now faciliate new tooling. I’m getting my grubby hands on it now.

BizUnit (3.x) Snippets

This is sooo like me. Always late to the party.  🙂 . Just this evening, before i found out that v4 had been released (although i knew it was in the works for sometime) , in the latest code drop for BizUnitExtensions (3.0.0.1) , I’ve included some snippets that i wrote quite a while ago and just never got round to uploading. Take a look. I know its rather late and probably completely out of date now that v4 is released but hey, v4 is still alpha so i have some time to catch up.

BizUnitExtensions Futures

So what of the BizUnitExtensions project itself? As you may have seen, there hasnt been any updates or releases for many  months now. The reason is that although for the past 18 months I have been involved in a major BizTalk gig, we have been required to use a custom test framework which has left no scope to use BizUnit at all. Consequently,  I let the codebase languish with only one or two minor updates.

Although project-wise nothing has changed, just today I decided it was time to give BizUnitExtensions some attention. I have recompiled the sources (after the codeplex TFS upgrade) and added the snippets in. I have also started to do some major restructuring of the code-base and recompiling against .NET 3.5, EntLib 4.1 etc which I will make available shortly and possibly include some fixes that folks have described in the forums.

Beyond a minor release, I dont think I will continue to maintain BizUnitExtensions as a separate project. I’ve had discussions with Kevin Smith about merging the steps from this project into the main BizUnit distribution and v4 is where this will happen as soon as i get the go-ahead from him. With MockingBird and WSCFBlue  taking up the majority of my limited spare time, I have to let go of some projects. But i think merging the code into BizUnit (core) will be good for the community so it becomes a one stop shop. Most of the steps complement the core nicely by supplementing it with missing features and with the XAML foundation, efforts can now be directed towards tooling.

Check out the snippets and let me know if they add any value to you. If this is of some value, then I can try and do the same for v4 so when we merge we have a full set of new snippets. If you are an early adopter of BizUnit v4 and want to use Extensions functionality and can help with porting to XAML and/or writing snippets, do let me know.