Is nothing new that in the last weeks I been busy performing BizTalk projects migrations from BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to 2013 R2 and, unintentionally, it seems that I can pick up and detect all the “bugs”, problems or limitations that you might imagine… or not. The good news is that I have several topics to write about it in my blog, as you may have noticed by my recent posts.
As a BizTalk Developer when you create a new BizTalk Solution or open an existing one, you are used to having the BizTalk solution deploy option, of course in your development environment, which will allow you to easily deploy the entire BizTalk Solution directly from Visual Studio to your BizTalk Server runtime:
During these weeks I notice that when I migrated an old BizTalk Solution from Visual Studio 2005 (BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Solution) to Visual Studio 2013 (BizTalk Server 2013 R2 Solution), I will soon talk about this topic in my blog – project migration, I realized that the “Deploy Solution” option did not appear in the context menu of my Visual Studio Solution:
Cause
Visual Studio allows you to store different configurations of solution and project properties to use in different kinds of builds. To create, select, modify, or delete a configuration, you can use the Configuration Manager option present in the solution context menu.
A solution configuration specifies how projects in the solution are to be built and deployed. And by default, when you create a new BizTalk Solution or add a new BizTalk project to an existent solution, the “Build” and “Deploy” options are selected for the new project.
However, sometimes when we update (migrate) an old Visual Studio Solution to a newer one, in this case, Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2013, some of this configurations may disappear, or may not be present. The curious thing is that:
- if the “Build” option is not select in the solution configuration, the “Build Solution” option continues to appear in the solution context menu, but it does do anything;
- But if the “Deploy” option is not select in the solution configuration, the “Deploy Solution” doesn’t appear in the solution context menu;
Solution
To solve this problem you must select the Deploy option in your solution configuration, for that you must:
- In Visual Studio, right-click on your BizTalk Solution and select “Configuration Manager…” option from the context menu
- On the “Configuration Manager” window, in the “Project contexts” pane, for every project, select the Configuration and Platform you want, and select whether to Build it and whether to Deploy it.
- In this case, make sure that “Deploy” is selected
Right-click on your BizTalk Solution and the “Deploy Solution” will now be available.
