Biztalk deployment/building problems

Question

Has anyone ever bothered about the fact that BizTalk has a lot of annoying deployment/building problems.

For example if I use c# assembly classes to be build/deployed I regularly get sgen.exe errors, which get fixed if I remove them from my assembly, however then some dependencies are giving problems again, which then means I have to rebuild it and restart visual studio because they don't trigger the assemblies otherwise. And yes I always use the build event command:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\gacutil.exe" /i $(TargetFileName)

I also experience a lot of problems wwith serializing String or Booleans etc while building, which also become fixed after I restart my visual studio solution.

Also when you want to import an .msi file you have to unenlist & remove all running instances to have it deployed decently.

And let's not forget about restarting your host instances, which is an option on your visual studio project but barely ever works so manually restarting your host instances has become more than a routine.

Let's face it, there's a lot of other things which also keep on rising like references problems etc, and I'm sure I can think of a couple more after a day of work.

Does anyone have some tricks regarding these issues? Because I encounter them hourly. I was just wondering if other people encountered these too and maybe solved a couple of these issues.

Answer 1

We installed SP1 for BizTalk yesterday. The performance has improved a lot! Starting our orchestrations used to take ages. Only takes a couple of seconds now!

Answer 2

About restarting host instances, I have found the following "bts-reset" PowerShell script to be extremely useful: http://winterdom.com/2006/09/btsresetwithpowershell

It doesn't solve the problem, but it's faster to use than restarting host instances from the BizTalk admin console.

Otherwise, I agree with you that deployment is really too complex (especially when you have multiple projects/applications with dependencies between them), but the only "solution" I have is to carefully break down your projects/applications in a way that will minimize the problem.