Maintaining legacy BizTalk environments requires knowing exactly where the “landmines” are buried. One of the most notorious issues in BizTalk Server 2009 is the sudden breaking of schema references within Visual Studio.
📝 One-Minute Brief
BizTalk Server 2009 developers frequently encounter issues where schema references (imports/includes) break without warning. This is a known issue within the BizTalk project system. Microsoft released a specific hotfix to address these broken references, preventing compilation errors and “file not found” issues in the Mapper. This post identifies the symptoms and provides the direct link to the official Microsoft hotfix to restore project stability.
Problem
On a computer that is running Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009, you use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop a BizTalk application. In your BizTalk project, you add a reference to another BizTalk project. In this scenario, you may see the following behavior:
- The orchestrations in the referenced BizTalk project may show compiler warnings.
- The changes that are made to the referenced BizTalk project are not propagated onto the referenced project.
- When you edit the orchestrations of the referenced project, XLANG errors are thrown. These errors may disappear after the orchestrations are saved and recompiled.
- After you deploy the referencing project, the local copies of the referenced project’s binaries are deleted.
- After you deploy the referencing project, various errors or warnings occur in Orchestration Designer.
Cause
- This problem occurs because the project reference is lost intermittently when you develop a BizTalk project in Visual Studio 2008.
Hotfix
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2429050/cumulative-update-package-1-for-biztalk-server-2009
Applies To
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Branch
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Developer
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Standard
You must have BizTalk Server 2009 and Visual Studio 2008 installed to apply this hotfix.
Don’t let legacy bugs stall your maintenance tasks. Applying this hotfix is the first step in stabilizing any BizTalk 2009 solution that relies on complex, multi-project schema structures.
