TNWiki Article Spotlight - Behaviour Driven Development with BizTalk

Welcome to our TNWiki Article Spotlight on Tuesday!

Testing your solution is an important aspect during development. This accounts for many different types of development whether it is a program, service, portal or integration solution. An integration solution for instance can be developed with BizTalk Server. Now BizTalk Server is an application integration server product from Microsoft. It offers scalability, reliability and a plethora of adapters to integrate with many different protocols, systems and services. The latest version BizTalk Server 2010 is tightly integrated with Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server, and its AppFabric offering. BizTalk Server is a key product within Microsoft Integration Stack.

A BizTalk solution is built with Visual Studio. The later versions of BizTalk (2009, 2010) support unit testing through the testing facilities provided within Visual Studio (2008, 2010).  BizTalk artifacts like schema’s, mappings and pipelines can be tested using the unit test feature. This is the only out of the box feature for testing BizTalk artifacts. However, there are many community tools available through CodePlex like BizUnit, Orchestration Profiler or BizTalk Test Map Framework.

From a procedural aspect you can develop BizTalk solutions through a test driven- and/or behavior driven approach. The latter is detailed through today’s article spotlight: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) with BizTalk . This article has been written by Michael Stephenson a BizTalk Server MVP from the UK. Michael has in the past provided the BizTalk community with a lot guidance on testing BizTalk solutions. He has created the BizTalk Test Guide, a series of blog posts and webcasts on testing. He has now turned to the TechNet Wiki by creating this article.

In the Wiki article Michael describes what BDD is, which tools support it, and how to apply it to a BizTalk solution. The article sheds a different light for BizTalk developers on how they can develop a BizTalk solution. To increase the quality of BizTalk solutions Test Driven Development (TDD) and/or BDD can be of great use.

If you are BizTalk developer°architect than I recommend that you read this article and other resources on TechNet Wiki on testing. You will greatly benefit from using either TDD and/or BDD approaches as it will help you create better and more robust BizTalk solutions.

So go check out all the wonder, and dive in! The Wiki's warm.

- Ninja Steef-Jan (Blog, Wiki, Twitter, Profile)