In the last few weeks, I have been doing BizTalk project migrations successfully from BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 to the recent versions: BizTalk Server 2010/VS 2010 or BizTalk Server 2013/VS2012. In most of the scenario this is a simple task and regarding to Visual Studio we basically just need to open the “old” solution with the “new” Visual Studio and it will try to convert the solution using the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard tool, check more details in one of my previous posts: BizTalk 2010 – Migrate an old BizTalk Visual Studio solution to Visual Studio 2010.
Of course, this part is just the Visual Studio project migration, and in some cases, we need to make adjustments to our solution.
However, recently I faced a strange problem when I was trying to convert the Visual Studio solution, every time I tried it gave me the following error:
“Unable to read the project file “…\MyProject.btproj.user”. The project file could not be loaded. Root element is missing.”
📝 One-Minute Brief
that appears when migrating a BizTalk project to a newer Visual Studio or BizTalk Server version. The issue occurs because the .btproj.user configuration file becomes empty or corrupted during the copy or migration process. Deleting the .btproj.user file allows Visual Studio to recreate it and successfully import the project.
Cause
The *.btproj.user file is an XML file that contains not only the BizTalk deployment Settings but also several personal user settings like References path, test file names, and so on.
I’m not sure what happened with this file while copying the project to the new server, or during its time in the former development server. However, when I checked the file system for this file, I noticed that the file was empty:
Solution
To solve this problem, you just need to delete the User configuration file (*.btproj.user) from the file system and try to import the project or convert the solution again.
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