I’ve finally made a release of BizUnitExtensions. R1 BETA is targeted at Biztalk 2004. It consists of the core BizUnit product (source and tests) as well as the Extensions (source and tests). The core code base has been bug fixed (for all steps we used in our projects). The tests for the core code base have been completely revamped. All XML comments were thoroughly revised (again, this was done only for steps that we used and we fixed warnings in all other files as well).
If you want to run the provided unit tests please remember that the unit tests are provided as a indicative sample of what may be achieved and not guaranteed to run on your machines. This is because unlike NUnit tests which test the assembly in question and can be assisted by mock libraries, the BizUnit assemblies actually control real orchestrations and other Biztalk artifacts which it is impossible to mock and provide.
The core product for v2006 comes with a sample solution but the v2004 does not (we inherited these products and only bug fixed the code where necessary) so dont accuse us of inconsistency!!We have run a couple of the test steps against the SDK samples and the documentation indicates which these are and you should have them deployed first before using the tests.
The main thing is that the product works for all the steps we used (and there were quite a few that we used). But we didnt use ALL of the steps so it is quite possible that there are still some errors in the code base. Do report them and we will try and fix them. Or alternately if you can step through the code (which is very easy to understand) and provide a fix (and possibly a unit test-if it does not depend on your project assemblies) that would be very useful and we will include that in the code base.
As soon as a few people have used this and are happy that the product basically installs and works fine, we will upgrade it to the RTM release and barring bug fixes, we should be concentrating on v2006 after that, but 2004 WILL NOT be abandoned.
The changes to the core prooduct in v2006 would be a bit of a challenge because we have to merge our fixes from 2004 into the stuff that Kevin has written in 2006 and not lose any fixes he might have made.
We have fairly amibitious plans for v2006 including tests against the official MS tutorial scenarios that are more in-depth as well as some good tutorials based on our projects (without any confidential info of course), so please do support this effort. Theres actually a lot more on the cards, but we will reveal that when we make more concrete progress.
Another thing which would be useful for the community is people writing in to let us know how you are using BizUnit in your projects. Even if you cannot contribute code and support tools (for IPR and other reasons) it would be nice to know how its being used out there.