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.
Best Answer
Here's how I'm set up:
On my local machine:
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.