It’s no secret that in the last few weeks I’ve been busy migrating BizTalk projects from BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to BizTalk Server 2013 R2. Along the way, I keep stumbling into “bugs”, quirks, and hidden limitations. The good news? I now have plenty of topics to write about (as you’ve probably noticed in my recent posts).
As a BizTalk developer, you expect to see Deploy Solution when you right-click a BizTalk solution in Visual Studio. In a dev environment, this option lets you deploy the entire solution directly from Visual Studio to the BizTalk runtime.:
However, during one migration—from Visual Studio 2005 (BizTalk 2006 R2) to Visual Studio 2013 (BizTalk 2013 R2)—I noticed something odd: Deploy Solution was missing from the solution context menu.
📝 One-Minute Brief
When you migrate an older BizTalk solution to a newer Visual Studio version, Visual Studio may disable the Deploy flag in the solution configuration. Re-enable Deploy in Configuration Manager to bring back the Deploy Solution menu option.
Cause
Visual Studio supports multiple solution configurations. Each configuration controls how Visual Studio builds and deploys the projects in your solution.
In a new BizTalk solution, Visual Studio typically enables Build and Deploy by default for new BizTalk projects.
During a migration (for example, VS2005 → VS2013), Visual Studio can lose or reset some of these settings. When that happens:
- If the Build option is not selected 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 selected 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. You must:
- In Visual Studio, right-click on your BizTalk Solution and select the 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.
Hope you find this helpful! If you liked the content or found it useful and would like to support me in writing more, consider buying (or helping to buy) a Star Wars Lego set for my son.
