My 2 cents

I have never done a real BizTalk implementation. I have done many test scenario’s in order to test the specialized connectors that Covast built for use in BizTalk server. My first job as my apprenticeship at Covast was to build a test automation for their connectors. I built a framework in which many common steps could be dragged and dropped into a sequence, and in which each step could be separately configured. This provided a great boost in productivity while implementing the actual tests.

The control on the right mimics the Property Grid (this is one of my first GUI's and I never knew the property grid was available out-of-the-box untill shortly after this project :-) The colors relate to a specific stage in the testing process (cleanup, preparation, actual test etc...).

After testing

After finishing school, I stuck with Covast and was allowed to build some GUI parts that integrated into Visual Studio. This was one of the nicest projects I ever had! I enjoyed the freedom of making my own designs and implementing them (no technical constraints, just functional requirements). The following screenshot shows most of what was built. By the way, I can’t take all the credit for this. The greatest part was built by my colleges, however the GUI related stuff is mostly my work:

Also integrating it into Visual Studio was a great challenge:

HAT (Health and Activity)

The Health-and-activity plug-in is used to show an audit-trail of messages that went through the EDI adapters. Here I built a tree-list-view representation that allowed viewing interchanges, groups and messages within their context. I also made the debugging GUI that shows the raw data colored, and lets the cursor jump to the error location when selecting an error in the pane below.

This GUI proved to be not only helpful for customers, but especially for the internal developers who used it while debugging the EDI engine. Later, the same tree-listview component was reused for totally different uses, for example the transportation log (MMC snap-in):

Here the same tree-listview reused in the Covast EBMS adapter product: