BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool for BizTalk Server 2013 R2

Recently, my team and I developed and released several tools that extend the out-of-the-box capabilities of BizTalk Server 2016, helping developer and administration teams to be more productive by saving time on simple but time-consuming tasks that should not be. One of these tools was the BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool.

Because many clients are still using BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and I have received some requests from the community, I will be releasing these tools for BizTalk Server 2013 R2 as well. And today, we will start with the BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool

BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool

BizTalk Binding Exporter Tool is a simple tool that addresses the lack of advanced binding file generation capabilities in the BizTalk Server Administration Console, allowing you to generate and export a binding file from BizTalk Applications in an intuitive, easy way.

Exporting a BizTalk Server Application binding is, at first sight, a quick and straightforward task that can be done using the BizTalk Server Administration Console:

• Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft BizTalk Server 20xx, and then click BizTalk Server Administration.
• In the console tree, expand BizTalk Server Administration, expand the BizTalk Group, and then expand Applications.
• Right-click the application whose bindings you want to export, point to Export, and then click Bindings…
• On the Export Bindings page, in Export to file, type the absolute path of the .xml file to which to export the bindings.
• Ensure that the Export all bindings from the current application option is selected, then click OK.

But even in simple tasks, we may encounter challenges that require us to perform monotonous, boring manual operations that consume some of our precious time and are always prone to failure. Because the out-of-the-box BizTalk Administration Console doesn’t allow you to:

• Export a Binding file of a specific Receive Port or a list of Receive Ports.
• Export a Binding file of a specific Send Port or a list of Send Ports.
• Export a Binding file of a specific Assembly or a list of Assemblies.

And these are just a few scenarios. You can only fully export the binding files for an entire application, which can lead to extensive, error-prone manual work to clean them.

Usually, the binding exportation starts in development. Still, we also need to generate the same bindings for other environments, like production, and for that, we usually need to open the binding file and replace/fix the differences for each environment… which is usually a tedious operation. What we need to replace is mainly:

• The URIs: it should be fixed, but it is not mandatory. If you know what you are doing, you can fix them directly in the environment after you import the Binding.
• The host instances: not mandatory, if you have the same host and host instances names across all your different environments (as best practices will tell you to do).
• The NT Group Name associated in the Services (Orchestrations): according to securities best practices you shouldn’t use the same BizTalk Groups in different environments, so in this case, if you follow these best practices, you need to change these parameters in your binding file.

Normally, everyone changes the URIs, but neglecting the other parameters may cause problems during the Binding import.

Once again, this tool will extend default BizTalk Server capabilities transforming the tedious and sometimes complicate binding generation a little simple and easy.

You just need to specify the connection string to the BizTalk Management database (BizTalkMgmtDb)

This tool allows you to generate and export binding files with the following capabilities:

• Export binding(s) file(s) for an entire Application or a list of Applications.
• Export binding(s) file(s) from a specified Assembly or a list of Assemblies.
• Export binding(s) file(s) from a Receive Port or a list of Receive Ports.
• Export binding(s) file(s) from a Send Port or a list of Send Ports.
• Or generate different binding files for each environment if you create an Excel File with the mapping for each environment.

Credits also to my team member at DevScope, Pedro Almeida, who collaborated in the development of this tool.

Download

You can download the BizTalk Bindings Exporter Tool from GitHub:

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.