Deploy to the Server using Visual Studio

Until now we have been talking about development, creating schemas and transforming them using maps, and building workflows for business processes using orchestrations, but our project isn’t working in production yet. To do so, we need to deploy it to the server so that BizTalk can create a running application, and so that we can create all the physical ports for our application.

As I have already mentioned, building a project in Visual Studio and event-defining ports in orchestrations is a logical operation, as you can use the same project for multiple companies and will only need to deploy it to their servers and configure the physical artifacts on the application.

Deployment

Deploying your application is a very fast and easy step. Just right-click your project in Solution Explorer and select the Properties option to configure the application name, deployment database, and the server you want to deploy to.

Project properties

When the Properties windows opens, go to the Deployment tab and give your application a name (if not set, it will be deployed to Application 1), and make sure that the Configuration Database and Server are configured according to your needs. If you are using BizTalk Developer installed with default settings, you should see something like Figure 73:

Configure application name

The second setting you need to configure is the signing of the project. BizTalk uses strong names for DLLs, so a strong name key file is required. Go to the Signing tab and use an existing one if you have it, or create a simple one by selecting the Sign the assembly checkbox and the New option in the list box.

Because all BizTalk Assemblies need to be installed or registered in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), you need to sign them with a strong name key. An example can be seen in the Figure 74.

Signing the project

After naming the application and setting a signature, save your changes, right-click your project in the Solution Explorer, and select Deploy. Please make sure you are running Visual Studio with elevated privileges.

Deploy the project

Once the deployment is complete, the output windows will show you a success message, or an error message if anything went wrong. In our case, we had a success message, as you can see in Figure 76.

Successful Deployments

You can now open BizTalk Server Administrator, and you will see your application in the application list. The next steps are configuring and testing the application.

Applications in BTS Administrator