CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2010biztalk
Andy
Andy

Reputation: 2318

What do you need to develop in BizTalk

The company i work for has recently bought BizTalk 2010.

The seller has us create virtual machines running a ms server 2008, biztalk server, sql server and a visual studio. This is a major slowdown on my machine and i was wondering, do you need all this to develop in BizTalk? can't you just work on the local visual studio to do your developing, have a test environment where these local projects are deployed, and create a msi from this environment to instal on the live?

the seller themselves seem to think this isn't possible and my google skills are failing to help me on telling me that my idea is possible or not.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 5622

Answers (5)

Nick Heppleston
Nick Heppleston

Reputation: 1973

Theoretically you could develop locally and deploy to a remote machine however I think this will significantly slow down your development cycle. As Jay mentioned, you may hit conflicts if others are also deploying to the same environment.

I'm a big user of virtual machines myself for BizTalk Development - in fact I have a separate development VM's for each of my clients which is setup to their unique requirements. I don't run any development environments locally on bare metal as I tend to upgrade my laptop once every year and I don't want the headache of rebuilding each time.

You haven't mentioned what virtualisation solution you use, however you have mentioned that you are running it on your machine. If you are looking for a decent desktop VM solution, I can highly recommend VirtualBox (see http://www.virtualbox.org). Its owned by Oracle, but was originally a Sun Microsystems product. I did try VirtualPC and VMWare, however I have found that VirtualBox was the best fit for my needs being both stable and fast.

As for my current BizTalk 2010 VM development environment, I'm currently running a VM with 4Gb RAM on a 64-bit laptop with 8Gb and a Solid State Drive; I have the following software installed on the VM:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition 64-bit
  • SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit
  • BizTalk Server 2010 Developer Edition
  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional

N.

Upvotes: 0

Jay
Jay

Reputation: 14471

Here's how I'm set up:

On my local machine:

  • Visual Studio 2010
  • BizTalk server (2010)
  • Microsoft SQL server

I do not use a VM for development. A VM is generally about 5% slower then running the same thing "directly on the iron." I used a VM previously and have moved away from the practice for speed of development.

You could host BizTalk and SQLServer on another machine. I prefer to have them on my machine so I have my own test environment. It's faster and I don't have to worry about affecting anyone else while developing.

You need at least 4 gig of RAM. I would recommend 8 gig though. My machine is not slow with 4 gig.

I would also recommend you look at the biztalk development framework project It gives you a one button deploy via a script. It's very handy when doing a lot of development.

Upvotes: 3

SliverNinja - MSFT
SliverNinja - MSFT

Reputation: 31641

You can host BizTalk locally. The complexity of installation really depends on the feature set you seek. The simplest BizTalk environment uses Visual Studio, SQL Server databases, and BizTalk windows services. You can also use the BAM Portal which is coupled to SharePoint, but it's not required.

I know some companies work through the VM approach to simplify deployment. It is terribly slow in a VM, but makes it easy to get developers quickly running without bothering with configuration. I find the configuration is the most important aspect for professional BizTalk developers - it just depends on what level you are coming in at.

Deploying BizTalk solutions is as easy as packaging up the MSI and binding configurations via an Import/Export command.

Upvotes: 1

tom redfern
tom redfern

Reputation: 31760

You can certainly host your local dev SQL instance on another machine. But there is no way (BizTalk 2009 at least) of decoupling the development tools from the product itself. But you are correct in that you don't need to deploy locally to your dev BizTalk instance.

However, having all this stuff locally really simplifies life. Not sure what you would gain by hosting everything remotely. RAM/processor is cheap enough.

Upvotes: 1

Dominic Zukiewicz
Dominic Zukiewicz

Reputation: 8444

You will need SQL Server as it does the message management for BizTalk.

To reduce work on your machine, you could install SQL Server on another machine, but make sure it is in the same domain. I have found problems (with BTS 2006 mind you), when it has to communicate cross domain.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions