After playing with Visual Studio Team System for a while, the biggest draw back I have seen so far in the Developer SKU is that I can't get my unit tests to run with a build. A team build requires a test list and the only way to create a test list is through Test Manager and that is only available in the Tester SKU. Fortunately, I have Team Suite so I was able to create a test list, but the downside is that where I work, I am one of the only people with Team Suite, so every time a developer creates a new unit test, I am the lucky one who gets to add it to the list. After doing this a couple of times, I found it got old very fast, so I started to look at the vsmdi file that contains the test information and found it was a pretty simple xml file. The simplicity ended very quickly, though, when I found the Guid created for each test in the list is not just generated with Guid.NewGuid(). I did some hunting on the web to figure out how this Guid is created, but came up empty, so I decided it was time to bring out my old friend ILDasm and see what happens under the covers. For anyone interested (and I can't guarantee it will stay like this since the code was not in a publicly exposed API), the below method will generate the correct Guid for a test (where FullName is the fully qualified name of the method <Namespace>.<Class>.<Method> - since test methods never take parameters, method overloading is not an issue).

private Guid GuidFromString()
{
   SHA1CryptoServiceProvider provider = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider();
   byte[] buffer1 = provider.ComputeHash(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(FullName));
   byte[] buffer2 = new byte[0x10];
   Array.Copy(buffer1, buffer2, 0x10);

   return new Guid(buffer2);
}

I am still in the process of creating an application that will create test lists like what is created with the Tester SKU, but I wanted to post this in case other people are struggling to find the same algorithm for their needs.

Recently I switched roles where I work and we have started to use BizTalk quite extensively for our current project. We have also made the move to Team Foundation Server and VSTS and I got the great responsibility of getting our build system up and running. Now out of the box, Team Foundation Server has a great build story, but we had the requirement of being able to deploy our BizTalk application to a remote server and start the application as well. BTSTask.exe took care of 80% of that functionality by being able to add and remove an application and the resources for the application, as well as import bindings that exist within an XML file, but one thing I couldn't seem to find was how to start and stop a BizTalk application from the command line. Luckily BTSTask itself was a .NET application and since I am not afraid of ILDASM, I decided to take a look and see how BTSTask worked under the covers. One thing to warn you about is that all the documentation for the classes that are used within BTSTask (and also in the source code below) have the claim at the top stating the classes should not be used externally and are purely for internal BizTalk use. Overall, the program was pretty simple. I know there is not really any error handling or anything like that and the command line parsing probably isn't the most robust, but the command line syntax is very similar to what already exists for BTSTask and since the code is pasted below, you are more than welcome to modify it any way you would like.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM;

namespace BizTalkApplicationManagement
{
   class Program
   {
      private static string DatabaseName = "BizTalkMgmtDb";
      private static string DatabaseServer = ".";
      private static string ApplicationName;
      private static bool Start = false;

      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         ParseCommandLine(args);

         if (ApplicationName == null)
         {
            throw new ApplicationException("ApplicationName must be passed in");
         }

         Microsoft.BizTalk.ApplicationDeployment.Group myGroup = new Microsoft.BizTalk.ApplicationDeployment.Group();
         Application application;

         myGroup.DBName = DatabaseName;
         myGroup.DBServer = DatabaseServer;
         BtsCatalogExplorer explorer = (BtsCatalogExplorer)myGroup.CreateInstance(typeof(BtsCatalogExplorer));
         ApplicationCollection applications = explorer.Applications;
         application = applications[ApplicationName];
         if (application != null)
         {
            if (Start)
            {
               application.Start(ApplicationStartOption.StartAll);
            }
            else
            {
               application.Stop(Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.ApplicationStopOption.StopAll);
            }
            explorer.SaveChanges();
            explorer.Refresh();
         }
         else
         {
            Console.WriteLine("{0} does not exist in database [{1}] on server [{2}]", ApplicationName, DatabaseName, DatabaseServer);
         }
      }

      static void ParseCommandLine(string[] args)
      {
         foreach (string currentParam in args)
         {
            if (currentParam.ToLower() == "start")
            {
               Start = true;
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower() == "stop")
            {
               Start = false;
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower().Contains("applicationname"))
            {
               ApplicationName = currentParam.Split(':')[1];
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower().Contains("server"))
            {
               DatabaseServer = currentParam.Split(':')[1];
            }
            else if (currentParam.ToLower().Contains("database"))
            {
               DatabaseName = currentParam.Split(':')[1];
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

You will need to add references to Microsoft.BizTalk.Admin.dll, Microsoft.BizTalk.ApplicationDeployment.Engine.dll, Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM.dll, and Microsoft.EnterpriseServices.dll.

From the command line, you would then start an application like so:
BizTalkApplicationManagement Start -ApplicationName:<NameOfBizTalkApplication> -Server:<Server> -Database:<BizTalkMgmtDb>

Ok, I always seem to love to change my mind on things which I think is a big reason I never really get anything done. At first I was going to install a pre-packaged blog setup on my server, then I was going to write my own (which is what the past couple of weeks has been running), and then I decided that rolling my own was a bigger undertaking than I currently have time for, so I decided to go back to a pre-packaged deal. I am finally setting on dasblog as my engine. I am hoping over time to tweak it to be an actual .NET 2.0 project, but the good news is that as I change the UI, the underlying post server will still be the same, so my links and rss feeds should stay the same.