Hi all

Today I faced a very peculiar problem. I was helping a customer split a BizTalk project into two projects, because some of the schemas that were in the original project needed to be common for other projects.

So this is what i started out with:

which is: Two schemas and a map between them.

And this is what I would like:

So basically, the common schema has been transferred to a common project. Now, naturally, I need to reference the CommonProject from the OriginalProject and then reload the schema in my map to make it work. But this is where the weird part starts. After compiling the NewCommonProject and adding the reference, this is what showed up in the schema browser when I wanted to reload the schema in the map:

Basically, my new project didn’t have any schemas inside it. After much troubleshooting, thinking that the issue was something with the newly compiled dll didn’t get copied to the bin folder of the OriginalProject and trying lots of stuff with that, I finally figured it out.

I just happened to notice that the file size of the NewCommonProject.dll was only 5kb which seemed to small. So I browsed the dll in the object browser and it was totally empty. Weird. Then I went and looked at the properties of the schema, and didn’t see anything unusual. So I added a new schema to the project just to see what would happen with that. This new schema showed up in the schema browser. Even weirder. But then I went and looked at the properties of the schemas again and that’s when this new property suddenly showed up:

I changed the build action on the schemas to be “BtsCompile” and this did the trick. Now all the schemas showed up in the schema browser.

Now, another strange side to this story is, that by now, the Build Action property has disappeared again… I haven’t quite figured out when it appears and when it does not.

BUT, if you ever run into issues where your schemas just don’t show up anywhere… this might be your issue.

Hope this helps someone.

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eliasen