Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Hi all

I have been running into too many issues with BizTalk 2009 on VS.NET 2008 lately. This post is just to mention them and let everyone else know that they are not the only one – and that they will be reported to MS and hopefully fixed quickly.

Build action of schemas
Some times the “build action” of a schema in your BizTalk project is set to “None” instead of “BtsCompile”. When this happens, the schema is not compiled into the assembly and can therefore not be used for pipeline components, maps, orchestration messages, and so on. It happens if you drag a schema from your explorer into your project, but it also happens sometimes when you drag a schema between two projects inside VS.NET.

More build action of schemas
The above error could be more easy to live with, if it weren’t absolutely impossible to know when the “Build action” property of the schema in visible in VS.NET – some times the property is visible and you can change the value. Other times it is not. Quite confusing. I have found that if I add a schema to a project, then the property is suddenly visible for all schemas in the project. Change the ones that need changing and delete the schema you added.

Auto save a map before schemas are chosen
When you add a new map then at some point VS.NET auto saves the map, but if this happens before you have chosen both the source and destination schema you suddenly get an error, which you really do not expect, because you weren’t doing anything at the time of the error. This also occurred in previous versions of BizTalk.

Map looses information about schemas
I have seen several times, that even after choosing source- and destination schema for a map and dragging a couple of links in the map and saving it, then at compile time, I get an error about the map not having source- and destination schemas. So I need to choose them again, and redo all the links, because they have magically disappeared. This happens for maps that uses both schemas from the same project as schemas from referenced projects.

Output window
The output window seems to not always show all information when compiling/deploying. Some times the information comes all at the end instead of being written to the output windows as it happens. Other times, I can rebuild my entire solution and the output windows will only show me the one warning that occurred during compilation.

Dragging elements in Schema Editor
Dragging elements inside the schema editor has had me baffled since BizTalk 2002. Some times, I need more than 20 tries to get an element to be dragged – and sometimes it just works. Annoying? Indeed it is!

Copy local fails
If I have a project (P2) that references another project (P1), then after I have added an item to P1 and recompiled it, everything seems OK. BUT, if I then deploy from within V.NET, things start to go wrong. From then on, it seems that the “Copy local” property of the project reference is ignored. Whenever I recompile P2, I do NOT get the P1.dll copied to the local folder of P2. This causes all sorts of stuff as also explained here by Ryan: http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/17/biztalk-2009-amp-visual-studio-2008-annoyance-2.aspx

Setting properties for more than one project at the same time
See here: http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/15/biztalk-2009-feature-missing.aspx for Ryans thoughts on this.

--
eliasen

Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:22:24 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)  #    Comments [12]  | 
Wednesday, 22 July 2009 01:20:19 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Glad to hear i am not alone ...

I am having more troubling issues than just the one you mentioned.
Check http://dotnet.org.za/ryancrawcour/archive/2009/07/17/biztalk-2009-amp-visual-studio-2008-annoyance-2.aspx
This one wastes a lot of time for me, as I am having to find that constantly have to remove project references, rebuild and readd references.

I don't believe it means BizTalk 2009 is unstable and I will continue to use it because of the gains I have found with the new version.
I don't believe that Visual Studio 2008 is unstable either as I have built many many projects with it and found it great.
It's just the two aren't playing nicely with each other right now.

I do hope for a hotfix real soon!
Wednesday, 22 July 2009 14:17:40 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Hi Ryan

I think that is my "Copy local fails" issue you are describing in that blog post?

--
eliasen
Monday, 27 July 2009 23:04:54 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Nice list Jan. I have experienced already 3 of that and only did a small schema project. But apart from that I do like the new version. Just a few nuisances luckyly not too much time lost looking for the solution.
Monday, 27 July 2009 23:06:15 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Nice list Jan. I have experienced already 3 of that and only did a small schema project. But apart from that I do like the new version. Just a few nuisances luckyly not too much time lost looking for the solution.
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 16:50:38 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Hi Pim

Yeah, you can get around them all, but some of them are really annoying to have to get around :-)

Thanks for the comment.

--
eliasen
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 17:59:53 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Great post for just the reason you said. I'm glad it's not just me having quality issues with BTS09 / VS2008. Whlie we are at it has anyone else noticed the quality issues with the administrator mmc snap in. There is no refesh icon on the toolbar at the top and many refreshes are just plain missing until you shut down the mmc and re-open it again. An example of this is changing adapter hosts. Overall very poor show from MS on what should be no an established product. Please MS service pack soon!!!!
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 19:51:50 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Hi Paul.

Thanks for the comment.

Yes, I have also had difficulties with the administration console - can't believe I forgot those in my blog post.

Especially, going to groub hub page ans trying to refresh ny pressing F5 - doesn't work most of the time.

--
eliasen
Friday, 21 August 2009 23:24:48 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Thanks so much for this post along with John's comment on the admin console issues - I just started using BTS 2009 last week and thought something was wrong in my VPC as I was experiencing most of the issues mentioned ... any idea when these issues are going to be resolved?

I also ran into the problem mentioned in Thiago's post: BizTalk 2009 – Deploying Orchestration Project Throws EnvDTE FileLoadException (and other issues). Redeploying Orchestrations from within Visual Studio is now a royal pain. I sure hope all of these issues are resolved soon as they are quite annoying.

Cheers.
Mike
Sunday, 23 August 2009 00:04:50 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Hi Mike

No, no idea yet as to when the issues will be solved.

--
eliasen
Monday, 24 August 2009 11:26:34 (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)
Hi,

This is very dissapointing from Microsoft that they let this product out will all these issues out. I can understand bugs, but this just shows that there was not propery quality assurance with BizTalk 2009. I mean how can you release a product that can cause allot of Visual Studio 2008 compilation problems. This is a complex product off the shelf, even more complex when building custom solutions, and they make our lives more difficult by releasing an unfinished product. I have told the company I work for that we will not be upgrading from biztalk 2006 to 2009 until Microsoft addresses these issues.
Friday, 04 December 2009 17:30:06 (Romance Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
Hi - great article about those little annoyances, you just solved the btscompile issue for me, it was driving me nuts..

..with regard to you schema editor dragging the answer is to click and drag left or right first to pickup the item and then up and down to where you need it. Hope this helps!
Friday, 04 December 2009 17:32:27 (Romance Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
Nice article - you just solved the btscompile issue for me, really annoying, but now I know a way round it now until they fix it.

with regard to the schema editor, the work around is to click and drag left or right to pickup the node and then up or down to where you need it. It's stupid really, but atleast this works - hope this helps.
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