BizTalk Deployment including Send Port stubs

Question

I am inheriting a project which I am migrating from 2006 to 2010.

From what I understand, when I deploy a BizTalk solution from Visual Studio, the required ports should have stubs created automatically in the application.

Currently no ports are being created when I deploy. Is there a configuration option I'm missing for this, or am I incorrect in my understanding and have to send up all the ports manually?

Answer 1

Send/Receive Ports will only be created automagically if you have an Orchestration/s that has a Send or Receive Port configured with its Binding as 'Specify Now' - this approach bakes the port configuration into the Orchestration and is then created when you deploy:

You will also see really funky Receive Port names following the deployment:

and Receive Location names:

This is the wrong approach IMHO - Send and Receive Ports should be created, configured and bound manually via the BizTalk Administration Console once you have deployed your solution. This way, you separate your service (orchestrations etc.) from your configuration bindings, which may change with each environment. Furthermore, you don't have funky port names in production that will need to be deleted :-)

I would recommend scripting the deployment once you have sufficient knowledge of BizTalk - this will also include importing configuration bindings once you have deployed your BizTalk assemblies (Orchestrations, Schemas, Pipelines etc.)