I had an interesting thing to solve: working on an enterprise solution in financial services, volume tests were planned to be executed on a test database on SQL server 2000 SP3. The database has around 70 tables, but some of them are estimated to be filled with millions of records in the next few years. The setup of the database requires quite complex reference data on which the mass data is inserted in around 10 tables, but in order to simulate the real life scenario, it is important to obey to ......

On April 6th, during MSDN Briefing, technical event dedicated to developers, testers and system architects, I had a presentation about some practical aspects (like big message maps and automated deployment) of the development process with BizTalk 2004. The presentation had a good feedback from the Microsoft representatives. Interesting enough, nobody in the MSDN audience had experience with BizTalk.On April, 7th, during the Solution Architect Briefing, I presented a case study of service oriented ......

Before starting to outsource to a company in Romania, there are a lot of questions that should be answered about the possible partner company: if there is enough resource, knowledge and reliability; if the foreign company's organization is compatible; how the communication will flow; how the structure of the project will be set up; how the financial and legal aspects will be clarified and so on. There are no generic answers to those questions but I can emphasize some interesting things and present ......