One of the biggest operational challenges in BizTalk Server environments is simple but dangerous:
You don’t always know what version is running in production.
Over time, hotfixes, emergency deployments, and manual changes create differences between:
- developer solutions.
- test environments.
- production servers.
And sometimes, the worst happens: the client no longer has the source code.
The BTSG NoS Add-in introduces a feature called JackHammering, designed specifically to solve this problem.
📝 One-Minute Brief
The third part of the BTSG NoS Add-in series introduces JackHammering, a feature that allows BizTalk developers and administrators to compare artifacts (orchestrations, maps, schemas) between their local Visual Studio solution and the version deployed in BizTalk Server environments. It can also extract artifacts directly from a BizTalk assembly or DLL, helping recover missing source code, verify deployed versions, and troubleshoot production discrepancies. The goal is to reduce deployment uncertainty and simplify maintenance of BizTalk solutions across DEV, TEST, and PROD environments.
JackHammering
JackHammering is a Visual Studio feature that allows you to:
- Compare a BizTalk artifact with the deployed version.
- Extract the deployed artifact back into Visual Studio.
- And validate version differences between environments.
It works with BizTalk artifacts such as:
- orchestrations
- schemas
- maps
You can accomplish this by accessing this feature:
- Right-click on your artifact (Orchestration, map, schema…) and select the Jackhammering option.
This feature is useful for several purposes and will mainly be used to validate whether the version we are using in development is equal to the solution published in your BizTalk Server environment: DEV, E2E, or even Production!
With this feature, you can, for example:
- Compare your artifact with the artifact deployed in the BizTalk Server environment or extract the artifact from the 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).
- An additional window will be presented for you to select the task you want to perform:
- If you select: Compare it.
- If you select: Extract it (on the left is the orchestration extract from BizTalk Server Environment, and on 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 the Extract from DLL option, it opens a file explorer window to select the DLL; the end result is the same.
JackHammering will be useful for Developers as well as Admins. Developers can use it to recover the solution to their BizTalk Developer machine because they lose their artifact (orchestration, map, schema, and so on) code, or in a normal situation when they arrive at the client, and they don’t have the source code!! Or just because you aren’t sure if you are using the latest version and so on.
But the admin will also have a good way to validate that the running solutions are the right versions, identify any differences, and know where problems can happen.
BTSG NoS Addin will be available soon… You just need to be a little more patient… stay tuned to Nino’s personal blog!
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