What is BTSG NoS Addin purpose and what features are available? (Part 2)

In my last post, I explained the proposal of BTSG NoS Addin, and I started to describe some of these features. In this post, we will continue to have an overview of all features available with this Visual Studio Addin and how you can use them.

Build Project

You are probably thinking, “Do I need another Build option?” And the reason is simple: sometimes we have a huge solution with several projects inside, and in these situations, trying to build a simple project can be a challenge in Visual Studio because it takes a huge amount of time to complete, due to all the dependencies.

This option builds the desired project without interacting with the Visual Studio design environment, making it faster than the native Visual Studio build.

You can access these features by:

• Right-click on your project name and select the Build project option.

Fast register/unregister in GAC quickly

How many times have you desired to have a simple, easy, and quick way to install a DLL, and why not also uninstall it in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), and why not directly from your favorite developer tool: Visual Studio? Instead, we need to install using the Gacutil.exe tool, and don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent tool, but it is not practical in day-to-day work!

Finally, now you have this option! At the moment, it is not a “direct” operation you can perform in your project. In other words, you need additional but simple steps to accomplish these operations.

You can access these features by:

• Select your project name, and then in the solution explorer window, click the Show All Files option.

• Navigate to the folder that contains the project DLL or the DLL that you want to register/unregister
  • For example: \bin\debug.
• Right-click on the DLL name and select the Register in GAC or Unregister from GAC options.

Note: This work with all DLL’s it doesn’t have to be a BizTalk DLL, you can easily register a C# Helper Class used by BizTalk Project in GAC with this functionality.

I personally LOVE this feature!

Deploy assembly

Again, you are probably thinking Do I need another deployment option? And the reasons are exactly the same as those for the Build project option we described earlier.

This operation will deploy a BizTalk assembly directly from the bin directory in the VS environment by simply right-clicking and deploying it:

• Select your project name, and then in the solution explorer window, click the Show All Files option.
• Navigate to the folder that contains the project DLL that you want to deploy
  • For example: \bin\debug.
• Right-click on the DLL name and select the Deploy assembly option.

This operation will be exactly the same as adding/updating a resource from the BizTalk Server administration console.
What’s the purpose? In some situations, I simply don’t want to use the Visual Studio environment with all the dependencies and other stuff. What I want is only to deploy the assembly fast.

This option will allow you to perform this directly from Visual Studio, making the operation faster than the native Visual Studio deployment.

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