Blog Intro - BizUnit Has Now Moved

Welcome to my blog!  

 My name is Ewan Fairweather and in this blog I'll be blogging about BizTalk and the other technology I work with at Microsoft. Expect about 80% of the content to be BizTalk related, I'll include posts on SQL and .NET as appropriate.

I've been working for Microsoft for three years now and currently work in the Premier Field Engineering team. In this role I get to work with enterprise customers, helping them to maintain and optimise their BizTalk applications. This involves providing both proactive (i.e. making sure it doesn't break) and reactive (helping them fix it when its broken) onsite assistance within the UK and the rest of Europe. I've also worked in a dedicated capacity on some of the world’s largest BizTalk deployments, predominantly within financial services. I hope to use this blog as a means to pass on my knowledge and experience to a wider audience than I alone can reach!

Most recently I've had the honour of writing the administration section for the upcoming Professional BizTalk Server 2006 book by Darren Jefford, Kevin Smith and myself. Although I'm very biased I must say that the content is looking great. The reviews that we've had back of the final versions of each chapter have been very positive. Yossi, one of the key reviewers for the book, has posted his comments here and Darren's latest post on the book is here.

 Now that my intro is complete, lets move onto my first post.

 BizUnit

This is a flexible and extensible test framework which enables rapid automated testing of distributed systems. This has been used on many of the world's biggest BizTalk projects and has been key to their sucess. It was developed by Kevin Smith whilst he was working on mission critical BizTalk projects for Microsoft Consulting Services. In my opinion this is a must do for all large BizTalk projects, I've seen many projects that have avoided this type of automated testing fail. This was originally hosted on gotdotnet, but Kevin has now moved this to codeplex and has added some really great intro text. I encourage you all to review it at https://www.codeplex.com/bizunit