When building a Visual Studio BizTalk Project, it gives the following error:
Unable to copy file “…\Pipeline Components\MyPipelineComponent.dll” to “bin\Debug\ MyPipelineComponent.dll”. The process cannot access the file “bin\Debug\ MyPipelineComponent.dll” because it is being used by another process
This was also an issue reported in the past on the MSDN Forums.
In the past, I posted an article regarding a similar problem:
📝 One-Minute Brief
When developing custom BizTalk pipeline components, Visual Studio often throws an “Unable to copy file” error because the DLL is locked by the BizTalk Service (BTSNTSvc.exe). This happens because the runtime has the component loaded in memory. To resolve this, you must stop the BizTalk Host Instances before rebuilding. A more efficient “pro-tip” is to use a Pre-build event or a PowerShell script to automate the stopping of services, ensuring a smooth “Code-Build-Deploy” cycle without manual intervention.
Cause
- Visual Studio has a lock on the file in order to show the pipeline components in the toolbox.
Or
- Some BizTalk process is running the BizTalk host and has a lock on the file
These two errors have basically the same solution, and to solve them, you can try two approaches:
Solution 1
- Close Visual Studio and restart the host instance to make sure the pipeline component DLL gets released.
- And then deploy the pipeline component.
Solution 2
- Rename the file (it is much faster).
- Restart the host instance.
- Deploy pipeline component.
- And then delete old DLLs.
This “file in use” error is simply the BizTalk engine doing its job too well by keeping components ready in memory.
This is ridiculous. How are you supposed to develop applications like this?
I know your frustration. This error may be a little annoyed but it not exactly a BizTalk error. This type of error can happen even when developing C # projects.
I’m developing BizTalk projects about 7 years and I just had this problem maybe 5 times 🙂
Hi Sandro,
I am getting this issue on the UAT environment, we are ending up by rebooting the server. Can you please advice if it can be resolve without Rebooting the server.
Cheers!!!
Hy Shadab,
This problem may occur if:
– Visual Studio has a lock on the file (you should close all VS windows) – but this option doesn’t apply to your situation
– Some BizTalk process is running BizTalk host and have a lock on the file;
– or if the process is associated with BizTalk Isolated host then the IIS AppPool has a lock on the file.
So my advice is restart BizTalk Host Instances, restart IIS (or recycle the application pool), this should do the work… if this doesn’t work you may try at last option restart also SSO service.
Thank you so much, renaming the files at least makes this slightly less annoying 🙂
Hi,
i had closed the admin console and closed all visual studio projects reset the IIS and restarted all the BizTalk services andSSO service too. opened once again my visual studio Biztalk project and trying to build my pipeline project.but, still facing with the same issue
Hi,
This is an old thread and me working with VS2012 do have the same problem. What is observed is that the orchestration projects keep locking the rest of the DLLs (schemas, map DLLs etc.,). I usually unload the orc project and clean the rest. Then reload the orc project and clean it again. That way I do not have to restart my VS. But I am looking for a more cleaner way.