New BizTalk 2010 Training from QuickLearn

By Rob Callaway

Last year was a busy teaching year for me. I taught 35 BizTalk training courses to over 385 BizTalk developers and admins around the world. I received lots of great feedback from our students on ways to improve on our BizTalk Server training. This has resulted in complete rewrites of our BizTalk 2010 Developer Immersion and BizTalk 2010 Developer Deep Dive to make our BizTalk Server 2010 courses even better than ever. Here is a summary of what’s new in these two classes…

BizTalk 2010 Developer Immersion

This class is still intended for students who are new to developing BizTalk Server solutions. However, we have re-written all of the hands-labs to provide a less-traditional end-to-end scenario that I think students will really enjoy working with. We’ve also abandoned the use of step-by-step instructions in later labs. Essentially, we show students how to perform a task one time and then make the assumption that they will be able to repeat the process on their own as they progress through the course. This learning style changes the dynamic of the labs and requires students to apply what they have learned instead of just following written instructions. This makes the lab experience more challenging and much more rewarding.

Also, we have added optional challenge labs for students who want to dive deeper into more advanced BizTalk development topics during open lab time or by remoting into our lab environment after hours. For example, we have challenge labs for students who want to learn about EDI integration, how to process HIPAA healthcare documents, how to write application deployment scripts, and many more. We have also added new modules that cover tracking and troubleshooting of BizTalk run-time errors and BizTalk project planning and management.

BizTalk 2010 Developer Deep Dive

In the past we have had some problems with the leveling for the Deep Dive class. We kept getting too many students with little or no experience with BizTalk, who were not prepared for an advanced BizTalk course. As a result, students were often left behind or the instructor had to water down the training to meet their needs.

After much deliberation we finally decided that it was time to make the Deep Dive class exactly what it should be, very advanced! In this class we absolutely hit the ground running. There’s no time for “introduction to…” conversations. We assume that students already know everything that is taught in the BizTalk Immersion class and crank the dial to 11 with over 30 hands-on labs! We cover all the fun things in BizTalk like: custom components (pipeline and functoids), loosely-coupled orchestration patterns (call/start orchestration shapes, direct-bound ports), convoys, calling pipelines in orchestrations, failed message routing, and more. In fact, this is probably the most fun I’ve ever had while teaching a BizTalk class.

Whether you are new-to-product or a seasoned BizTalk developer, we have the best training to fit your needs. Check out 2011 training calendar for upcoming classes.

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All about the Testing Applications with Microsoft Test Manager Course

By Anthony Borton

The 2-day Testing Applications with Microsoft Test Manager course is currently our most popular Visual Studio 2010 training course. For every public delivery of the course we are usually running 4 or 5 private in-house courses for companies. So why the demand for this course?

Microsoft has invested a significant amount of time and effort focusing on improving the testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. Here are a few of the key things you will learn by attending the Testing Applications with Microsoft Test Manager course.

Test Case Management

Learn how to create a Test Plan and configure properties for the test plan including test settings and configurations.  You’ll create Test Suites and link them to your requirements for traceability and reporting. During the course you’ll see how to write effective test cases and organize them for convenience and reporting.

Executing manual tests

Microsoft’s new Manual Test Runner is a purpose built application to allow you to step through your test cases and see how you need to interact with your application under test. You can record an action recording for a test case which will then allow you to fast forward one or more steps on subsequent test executions. This can be a huge time saving feature.

What’s changed? What do I need to retest?

Using the Test Impact Data Collector, you can select two different builds (eg. 2.1.10.1 & 2.1.12.1) and with the click of a mouse button see exactly what changes (work items) have gone in the newer build. You can also find out which test cases should be executed based on what has changed between the builds. Why run 200 tests when you only need to run 20 of them?

Raising data-rich bugs

One of the challenges a tester has is knowing what information and how much information to include in a bug report. Often testers don’t have time to include as much detail as they would like and developers invest more time trying to reproduce a bug then they might otherwise need to. Using the Test Runner, you can raise data rich bug reports that can include a wealth of helpful information for the developer. Through the selection of data collectors, much of the relevant information is automatically added to the bug report when the testers raises the bug. This means less time writing the bug and for developers, possibly a significant reduction in the time it takes to reproduce the bug.

Automated UI testing

The Mastering Testing with Visual Studio 2010 course will cover creating automated user interface tests called Coded UI tests. Coded UI tests can be generated from manual test action recordings or they can be recorded using the Coded UI test recorder. These tests have the great benefit of being able to be automated completely and included as part of the build process.

Report on test progress

Another time consuming task for testers is often creating the testing reports needed for management or to record the daily progress of your testing. In the course we’ll look at how to use some of the out-of-the-box reports and how you can quickly and easily create your own reports.

While the courses covers more than I have listed above, these are some of the most important things you’ll learn how to use by attending the Mastering Testing with Visual Studio 2010 course.

Our the next Testing Applications with Microsoft Test Manager course is scheduled for February 16th. Hope to see you there! 

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