This is one of those good news, great news posts!
Yesterday I found myself needing to make a vital change to one of the maps running in our "Invoice Processing" BizTalk application but I couldn't find a significant window of time when the application wouldn't be processing during normal working hours. It was the end of the month and our accounting folks were invoicing at their end-of-the-month fast and furious pace. I've never redeployed an application during our normal working hours before but the map was outputting XML that didn't quite meet our customer's specification perfectly and we were getting backed up, so I had to take a chance. I had already tested the "fix" on my development machine and staging server so I stopped the live BizTalk application, deleted it, uninstalled the .msi, imported the new .msi, installed the .msi, imported the production bindings (just to make sure), restarted the application. All in 39 seconds!
NO, this is not the "recommended approach" and I'd certainly never advocate this unless absolutely necessary, but with BizTalk Server 2006 you can "deploy on the fly"!
Technorati Tags: BizTalk, BizTalk Server