Okay, so thanks to everyone who has downloaded the RC1 bits of the extensions library. It seems to be working fine and i havent recieved word of any problems (except for one small bug in the string formatter step which will be fixed in the next update. We’ve got a list of things we want to work on to make the framework more of a proper product and make it really tester friendly and we’d like to invite feedback via email and on the discussion forum at http://www.codeplex.com/bizunitextensions. Let us know what you think.

Right now its rather developer focussed and involves lots of code. Do you like it the way it is or should we aim to put in some fancy GUI? what other steps do you think are missing that would be valuable for us to add in? how about steps you might have written that could be added in to the main code base?

As for those of you who arent using this tool, what are you using to test your Biztalk projects? I’ve heard that lots of folk have just rolled their own custom framework steps based on NUnit and most do lots of manual testing. Is that really sustainable? what are the pain points you are facing especially when using Biztalk ? (Would also be interesting to know what other products such as TIBCO, webMethods etc provide in the way of testing) Perhaps we should open up some discussion on approaches to testing and what works and what doesnt? Integration testing is definitely one of the areas where there is little in the way of best practice published and available.