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

In my last post, I explain the proposed of BTSG NoS Addin and I start 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 can you use them.

Build Project

You are probably thinking you do I need another Build option? And the reason is simple, sometimes we have a huge solution with several projects inside, and in this situations try to build one simple project can be a challenge with Visual Studio because it simply takes a huge of time trying to make this task because of all of the dependencies.

This option will build the desired project without any interaction with the Visual Studio design environment, making this operation faster than the native build operation on Visual Studio.

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

Finally, now you have this option! At the moment is not a “direct” operation that you can do 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 “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 “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 you do I need another Deploy option? And the reasons are exactly the same as de “Build project” option that we described earlier.

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

• Select your project name and then in the solution explorer window click “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 “Deploy assembly” option

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

This option will allow you to make this directly from Visual Studio, making this operation faster than the native deploy operation on Visual Studio.

BTSG NoS Addin will be available soon… you just need to be a little more patience… stay tuned to Nino personal blog!