The woes of BizTalk build and deployment

Recently I was tasked with helping to devise a standard method for our 'build and deploy process' for BizTalk applications.

So I pulled out my  Pro BizTalk 2006 book and started to dig. Sure enough, page 40 begins a section titled "Creating a Build-and-Integration Environment". The book lays out a 5 step process which I found incredibly useful. It helped me to get a better idea of how the process works.

Next we started examining using MSBuild as well as  Scott Colestock's Deployment Framework for BTS 2006 using NANT. Over the weekend, a friend of mine told me about how they are using Team Foundation Server. Unfortunately, we won't have TFS available here at work until the Fall sometime....

In the end, what I'm learning is that there is no magic bullet for this process....

 More to come as things start to come together...