Although BizUnit is widely used to test BizTalk solutions it could be very useful for the automated testing of different distributed systems. In this post I will try to have a look at this framework from generic integration developer point of view. BizUnit is designed to enable a developer or a tester to rapidly build test cases which are simply XML documents (although it is possible to construct them dynamically using BizUnit object model as well). Each test case consists of three sta ... [Read more]

If you review Microsoft BizTalk Hyper-V Guide you can get a rough idea about throughput and latency of BizTalk solutions under Hyper-V. Throughput of the BizTalk solution in virtual environment is roughly 29% lower than the throughput attainable on physical hardware. If you place the SQL Server databases used in the BizTalk environment on Hyper-V virtual machines as well, throughput of the BizTalk solution will drop 12% more. Latency of the BizTalk solution under Hyper-V is roughly 10% low ... [Read more]

Interesting example of using virtualization in production environment was reported on SOA and BPM conference in Reading on 26 November. The task was to have a BizTalk group cluster in production. For 2 BizTalk servers in the group they needed to have at least 6 physical computers ( 2 BizTalk and 1 SQL in one node) to achieve their goal. Hardware expenses for such a configuration were considered as unacceptable. Instead of deployment to physical environment another way was chosen. They used ... [Read more]

With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 comes the ability to work with spatial data. This allows us to store, manipulate and visualise spatial data whilst getting all the benefits of persisting data to a SQL Server database. In this post I will be looking at the different types that are used to store this data as well as how to work with the methods associated with these types. Spatial Reference Systems To represent a geographical entity, a coordinate system is needed. There are many ... [Read more]