My Contributions to Popular BizTalk Server Tools
One of the things I’ve been doing over the last six months is enhancing two well-known BizTalk Server tools: the Deployment Framework for BizTalk and the GenerateTypedBAMAPI tool. I also created a CodePlex project of my own, Environment Settings Manager, which was incorporated into the Deployment Framework and is very useful in its own right.
I never took the time to stop and mention all of the changes and new features, so here’s a summary:
Deployment Framework for BizTalk:
- Contributed the Environment Settings Manager project, which includes an environment settings spreadsheet that looks like the original one from Loren Halvorson, but does not use any macros and supports saving as either binary XLS or XML (SpreadsheetML). The companion command-line utility can take in either type of file and export the environment-specific XML settings files that the Deployment Framework uses to create environment-specific configuration files on the fly.
- Added initial support for side-by-side deployment (multiple BizTalk app versions installed at once): added a “project” version property, added the version to the installer title and default install folder path, added version number to the BizTalk application name and SSO affiliate app name
- Added initial support for deployment of BAM activity definitions
- Updated WiX (for MSI generation) to 3.0.x, in the process drastically simplifying GenericBizTalkMSI.wxs and improving the MSI user interface
- Modified the installer to completely clean up on uninstall, removing all dynamically generated files
- Modified SetEnvUI.exe (the wizard) to open the file browse dialog in the current directory vs. C: and replaced a P/Invoke call with a Framework call
- Modified the installer to install “for all users” vs. only for the current user
- Simplified and improved the clarity of the checkbox captions in the server deploy/undeploy wizard
- Added an attribute to the UpdateSSOConfigItem Nant task for the BizTalk Application name
- Made minor documentation updates and replaced the HTML version of the help with a PDF version
- Updated to NAnt 0.85 release from RC1
- Included the Visual Studio Tools menu install scripts in the Sample ZIP file
- Cleaned up the project a bit, removing unused files, etc.
GenerateTypedBamAPI:
- Checked in the source code for the first time
- Added support for a relative path to the Excel workbook vs. explicit path only
- Added the partial keyword to the generated API class
- Added a method to the activity classes to enable continuation and return a continuation ID
- Added a command-line parameter to specify the .NET namespace of the generated code
- Changed “ESApi” to EsApi to conform to .NET capitalization conventions
- Added “Activity” to the end of the activity class names
- Explicitly passed “en-us” culture info to the Excel methods to avoid a globalization bug reported by users
- Made other minor code improvements, removed XSLT resource class in favor of Visual Studio’s built-in resource support
While I was at it, I added to the GenerateTypedBamApi project a completely new command-line utility program called ExportBamDefinitionXml that can extract the BAM definition XML from an XLS file and write it out to a file. This utility can be used to automatically keep a BAM XML in sync with a BAM XLS file during local or automated builds. The code reuses some of Darren’s code that was already present in GenerateTypedBamApi.
The majority of the changes listed above are not yet built into official “releases” on CodePlex, but hopefully that will happen soon — I just need to coordinate with the project owners. In the meantime, hop over to the Source Code tabs and grab the latest from there. Please feel free to enter new Issues and Discussions topics in the projects with your ideas and bug reports.
Enjoy!
