Simplifying Deployment of BizTalk Assemblies

When you’re developing BizTalk Server 2004 stuff, you probably know the different steps of the deployment process of a BizTalk assembly by heart: unenlist the orchestration, undeploy the assembly, deploy the new assembly, bind the orchestration, start the orchestration. You can leave out the bind step if you choose to define your bindings at design time, but still it’s a tedious process. Luckily that BizTalk community has done some efforts to simplify this process! I’m only highlighting two of them, if you use another tool/technique/trick let me know!

 

  • BizTalk 2004 Administration Management Tool
    A tool that can be used to manage and administer BizTalk 2004, whilst in a production environment with out the need for Visual Studio. It also makes life a lot easier for the general developer, with enhancements in all of the general tasks a developer would need to do.
    If you’re doing BizTalk development you definitely have to check this one, it’s the BizTalk Explorer on steroids! I like the ability to extract the binding information to an XML file, so you can easily add the bindings again after you’ve deployed your assembly. If Paul Somers add a macro feature to this tool it would be perfect!
  • BizTalkAutoDeploy
    BizTalk Auto Deploy is a visual Studio Add-in which enables BizTalk developer to deploy/undeploy BizTalk Project easily with single click. I will start with simple requirements and will be advanced later. No need to NAnt during development, add-in is better. We will use the following technologies:VS.NET Object Model DTE, WMI.

    Simplifying Deployment of BizTalk Assemblies

2 Comments

  • I use a little batch file that uses WMI to do all those steps. The WMI scripts are modified versions from the Biztalk SDK.



    Heres what my .bat file looks like:

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    @ECHO Calling the WMI script to Stop and Unenlist the orchestration...

    @CScript /NoLogo StopOrch.vbs MyCompany.Biztalk.Orchestrations.MyComponent MyComponent Unenlist





    @ECHO Undeploying orchestration...

    @BTSDEPLOY REMOVE ASSEMBLY="C:\MyComponent\bin\Development\MyComponent.dll" UNINSTALL="true"





    @ECHO Stopping Biztalk Hosts

    @CScript /NoLogo StartHosts.vbs Stop





    @ECHO rebuild my aplication and install assembly in the gac...

    DevEnv "C:\MyComponentBusiness\MyComponentBusiness.sln" /Build Debug

    @gacutil /if MyComponentbusiness.dll





    @ECHO Deploying orchestration...

    @BTSDEPLOY DEPLOY ASSEMBLY="C:\MyComponent\bin\Development\MyComponent.dll" INSTALL="true"





    @ECHO Starting Biztalk Hosts

    @CScript /NoLogo StartHosts.vbs Start





    @ECHO Calling the WMI script to enlist and start the orchestration...

    @CScript /NoLogo EnlistOrch.vbs MyCompany.Biztalk.Orchestrations.MyComponent MyComponent Start



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  • I've had good luck using NAnt to automate not only the biztalk-specific aspects of deployment (both on developer desktops and on servers) but also things like virtual directory and application pool management (that wind up being part of a biztalk solution.) See www.traceofthought.net.

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