Ok, so developing solutions in BizTalk is like building a dinosaur from Lego. You start out with the smallest blocks and try to make something big: lots of work. In the office work is in progress on the Aviva MOSS 2007 Portal and Blog sites. Most of the work is pushing pixels around in CSS files. My BizTalk 2006 project is very similar, drawing lines on maps. Very tedious, but someone has to do it. Just make sure it’s not me next time.
Most of the work for BizTalk is very straightforward, once you get the hang of it. That is 1 - 0 for the developer. Then there is the dreaded “Failed to update binding information”, a.k.a. deployment errors, big time. Somehow, after redeploying several times, BizTalk chokes and gives up on redeployment. Restarting the computer is the only solution and after that there is another half day of productive work, before running into the same problem again. However, today things got worse. I added a pipeline to a project to support the “Flat File Assembler” pipeline component. Presto! No redeployment for me anymore. BizTalk was ready for the pounce: 1 – 1.
There was still a way to get around redeployment, remove the old application and rebuild all bindings. That’s when you appreciate the “Export bindings” option of BizTalk. When I started my project I put all of the stuff in a single project and a single BizTalk application. My mentor Randal quickly pointed out that it is a better idea to split up parts of the solution into smaller projects from the start. At first I still kept all projects in the same application. To tackle the deployment problem a logical thought was to put everything in different applications. Once I got the hang of passing all references to different applications, everything was up and running again.
At the first redeployment it started all over again: “Failed to update binding information”. Now things were worse. Visual Studio even produces more warnings, because it wants to warn you for all cross references. This, on top of all mapping warnings is annoying. Redeployment turned into reference spaghetti, but that is when I pounced. I checked the “Resources” sections of all applications, and removed the latest added pipeline: 2 – 1.
To conclude and summarize, my best guesses to tackle redeployment problems:
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Delay your first deployment until the last moment. Try testing your schemas and mappings in the development environment while you can.
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Version all parts of all projects in your solution. Put the versioning also in the namespaces.
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Make sure that all target namespaces are unique. Duplicates are introduced when you copy and rename a schema and forget the target namespace rename.
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Check all application’s “Resources” sections. It is all too easy to have an assembly from your project to end up in the common “BizTalk Application 1” application, instead of a preset Application.
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BizTalk doesn't seem to like more than one level of referencing between applications. At least when you look at deployment issues.
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An empty pipeline with a Flat File Assembler immediately gives you deployment problems. I will investigate this...
Hope this helps!