What is BTSG NoS Addin purpose and what features are available? (Part 1)

What is the purpose of the BTSG NoS Addin?

The purpose of BTSG NoS Addin is to help all BizTalk developers, and why not, all BizTalk administrators too, in a lot of different situations, by improving the developer experience and reducing the development time in new or existing BizTalk projects.

It will provide several functionalities like quick search inside artifact, fast register/unregister in GAC, find critical, internal or external dependencies… and much more functionalities like JackHammering, which will compare your VS artifact with the artifact deployed in BizTalk environment, you can also extract the artifact (Orchestration, map, schema and so on) from BizTalk environment and put it in the VS solution or even test your pipeline in VS simply … several features that are usefully in our day by day work and a time saver in a lot of situations.

How to get started with the addin?

After installing the addin, the first thing you need to do is to load the BTSG NoS addin to Visual Studio by:

• On the Tools menu, click Add-In Manager.
• In the Add-in Manager window, select the add-in from the list.
  • You can select the option Startup so that the addin is available as soon as you open your Visual Studio solution
• Check the box next to the add-in in the Available Add-Ins column, and then click OK.

(see my previous post for more details).

BTSG Settings

When you install the BTSG NoS addin, it will define three (3) default settings for the internal use of the addin. You can check and configure these settings by:

• Right-click on your solution name and select the BTSG Settings option.

• BizTalk Server Name: Name of the SQL Server instance that hosts the BizTalk Management database, “.” (local) by default.
• BizTalk Configuration Database: Name of the BizTalk Management database for the group, BizTalkMgmtDb by default.
• Be verbose: This option is active by default. This option is good for debugging problems because it will display to the user more detailed messages in the output window about what is happening.

To check the messages produced by the addin you just need to select BTSG in the output window, and you will see the messages:

Build and scan the solution (the most important step)

Because the addin works with a lot of reflection, in some functionalities, before you start using the addin in your BizTalk Solution, and also for the addin work with precision, you need to build your solution and then Scan solution by:

• Right-click on your solution name and select the Scan Solution option.

Note: If you already have the solution build, i.e., you already have the correct DLL files generated in the respective solution folders, then you just need to Scan solution.

What is the Scan Solution?

This option will analyze your solution: all the files, folders, DLLs, and so on, so it can have a clear notion of what is composing your BizTalk solution: how many projects exist in the solution, what types of artifacts each project has, and what the dependencies are between projects. These are some of the tasks this option will analyze to work consistently and accurately.

List of available features

In this section, we will have an overview of all features available with this Visual Studio addin and how you can use them.

Expand and Collapse solution

Let’s start with the basic new functionalities that are available in the context of the solution:

• Expand Solution: This option expands all projects in your current solution. This feature can be useful when we want an easy, simple way to visualize the entire structure of the solution.

• Collapse Solution: This is exactly the opposite of the previous feature. This option will collapse all the projects in your current solution in a simple and easy way.

You can access these features by:

• Right-click on your solution name and select the Expand Solution or Collapse Solution options.

Wild Search

I think the name explains the feature itself. This feature will perform full-text searches in all the artifacts of your entire solution, which means that, for example, in Schemas, it will search for elements, records, and attributes, but also properties of the map itself; in orchestrations, it will search for shape names, message names, variable names, and so on. The best way to explain how this operation works, or to find an analogy, is: inside Visual Studio, open the artifact (schema, map, orchestration, and so on) with the XML (text) Editor, and search within that artifact. Now, think of this process automatically to all the articles in your solution.

We can also call this by selecting the Search ➤ Selection ➤ Open it operation.

Because all the artifacts in your entire solution that meet the search requirement will be selected, and you will have the option to open them all automatically after the search finishes.

You can access these features by:

• Right-click on your solution name and select the Wild Search option.

Reflector

This feature will create a report with a lot of useful information about your entire solution or for a particular project in our solution, so that you can analyze:

• It will provide some statistics and metrics, for example
  • Solution metrics: number of projects, artifacts, orchestrations, transformations, Schemas, and Pipelines.
  • Artifact metrics: Information about the kb average used by the artifact in memory, or some metrics to understand the complexity of the artifact (orchestration, map, and so on).
• But also information about:
  • What use does this artifact have, or what does this artifact do (very useful with orchestration)
  • Show all the information like:
    • Artifact dependencies
    • What ports are used by this orchestration, schema, or map?
    • How many shapes exist in the orchestration, or how many Transactions (Atomic, Long Running) exist, Compensation, or Error handling?
    • How many Construct messages, or even how many transformations?
    • How many Functoids or links exist inside a transformation?
  • And so on.

This is basically an interactive report or documentation of your solution. Interactive because you can interact with the report, and it will automatically open the artifact while you are reading it. You can open the directory, maps, orchestrations, schemas, and so on directly from the report.

The reflector can be used at all levels of your solution, from a simple artifact to a single project, or to produce a full report of your entire solution (this last means a report of all the artifacts in the solution).

This can also be used to produce good documentation of your BizTalk Projects

You can access these features by:

• Right-click on your solution/project or artifact name and select the Reflector option.

BTSG NoS Addin will be available soon… You just need to be a little more patient… stay tuned to Nino’s personal blog!