Could we become agile using Biztalk?

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I've read the Aaron Skonnard comments about Biztalk, it is a great resume about BTS, if you read it: https://pluralsight.com/blogs/aaron/archive/2005/04/14/7356.aspx please don't forget the comments, and also the official response https://pluralsight.com/blogs/aaron/archive/2005/04/25/7717.aspx.

 

There are some factors, further the price or the Tx Performance I would like to comment, and it's about agile.

 

I've been a VB/Web developer, I learned the component technologies with COM, ASP, ActiveX, VBScript and so on …

 

.Net has been for me like going from junior programmer to a senior developer, I have learned and apply OO, DesignPatterns and SOA architectures.

 

But the most effective and productive change we have suffer in the last two years is agile development, their values and practices have been learned for a lot developers, from the OpenSource developers of the Mono project, to the TestSuites included with the MS EntLib, almost everyone has understand the value of the agile principles:

 

· Simplicity

· TestingMethods

· Continious Integration

· Short Iterations

· Refactoring

 

At the same time, the .Net Fx1.0 has been a SOA enabler, through the XmlSerializer, It's attribute based description has been the most powerful WebService implementation until date. The WebServiceExtensions Security Stack it's become truely INTEROPERABLE, and the road to indigo has began.

 

So the last year we have the opportunity to apply all this practices to a real project, we have designed the system using TDD and NUnit, we have applied a CI approach to build the source tree, we have implemented a versioning approach based on Nant and CC.Net and we feel with control and power about the whole system behavior.

 

In the middle of this revolution, MS shipped the second major release of the BizTalk Platform, like Aaron said, I love the SOA features: Messaging, Multi-Transport and Pub/sub Pattern. But I can't use them because the lack of simplicity and testing methods on the product designs.

 

I NEED to automate the testing process of:

 

o Pipeline Components (more on this soon…)

o Full Piplelines

o Functioids and Maps

o Adapters

o The whole configuration and binding process

o The messaging staff

 

And also we need a way to plug-in our SelfTested business logic without use Orchestrations.