What is BTSG NoS Addin purpose and what features are available? (Part 3)

For several reasons, some people don’t like the day of their birthday… I, on the other hand, love it! I enjoy celebrating the day with family and friends, receive gifts … but also give back something!

And as happens every year on this day, I always try to write a post for the BizTalk community… this year I will introduce the most expected features of BTSG NoS Addin… the infamous JackHammering!

JackHammering

You can accomplish this by access this feature by:

• Right-click on your artifact (Orchestration, map, schema…) and select the “Jackhammering” option

This features is useful for several things and will be mainly used to validate if the version we are using in development is or is not equal to the solution that is published in your BizTalk Server environment: DEV, E2E or even Production!

With this feature you can, for example:

• Compare your artifact with artifact deployed in BizTalk Server environment or extract the artifact from BizTalk Server environment into your BizTalk Solution by:
  • Double click in your artifact (in this case the Orchestration) (Note: Nino is fixing the layout of the screen)

• And an additional window will be presented for you to select the task you want to perform:

• • “Compare it”

• • Or “Extract it” (in the left is the orchestration extract from BizTalk Server Environment and in the right is my orchestration version in Visual Studio)

• Or you can accomplish the same task from an assembly file. This option is extremely useful if you import the DLL from production to compare to your version in your developer environment because normally the DEV machine cannot connect to production.

• When you choose “Extract from DLL” option, it will open a file explorer windows to select the DLL, the end result will be the same.

JackHammering will be useful for Developers but also for Admins. Developers can use it to for recover the solution to your BizTalk Developer machine because you lose your artifact (orchestration, map, schema and so on) code, or in a normal situation when you arrive at the client and they don’t have the source code!! Or just because you aren’t sure if you are using the last version and so on.

But admin will also have a good way to validate if the solutions that are running are the right versions, if there are differences and knowing where problems can happen.

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