This post was originally published here
Typical basic error for beginners that also occur sometimes even with experienced BizTalk developers… While trying to deploy a BizTalk Server solution directly from Visual Studio 2017 I got the following errors messages:
| Severity | Code | Description | Project | File | Line | Suppression State |
| Error | A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) The network path was not found | 0 |
| Severity | Code | Description | Project | File | Line | Suppression State |
| Error | Deployment cannot initialize the connection to the database “BizTalkMgmtDb” on server “BIZTALKDEMO”. Verify that you have the required security permissions and that communication between Distributed Transaction Coordinator services on the machines involved is not prevented by current DTC security, firewall or authentication settings. A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) The network path was not found | 0 |
Cause
This error may occur for several reasons, like BizTalk Server cannot communicate with SQL Server machine because some firewall restrictions or SQL Server does not accept Remote Connections or that SQL Server Network Protocols are not properly configured – I wrote a few days ago a blog post about that: WCF-SQL Adapter: Connecting to the LOB system has failed. A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server– and so on.
However, in the cause of this problem is quite different, the first error doesn’t tell us to much about the main cause of the problem but the second one:
Deployment cannot initialize the connection to the database “BizTalkMgmtDb” on server “BIZTALKDEMO”…
Gives you a good clue about the problem.
In fact, I was migrating an existing BizTalk Server solution to a new server and I forgot to update the Visual Studio deployment properties and the Server was pointing an incorrect to an incorrect an inaccessible SQL Server.
Solution
Again, this is a typical a beginner error and quite easy to fix, so to solve the problem you just need to properly configure the BizTalk Server deployment properties in all your Visual Studio projects inside your solution by:
- In Visual Studio Solution Explorer, right-click a project for which you want to configure properties, and then click “Properties”.
- Click the “Deployment” tab in Project Properties Designer.
- And make sure you properly configure the following properties:
- Application Name: Name of the BizTalk application to which to deploy the assemblies in this project. If the application already exists, the assemblies will be added to it when you deploy the project. If the application does not exist, the application will be created. If this field is blank, the assemblies will be deployed to the default BizTalk application in the current group. Names that include spaces must be enclosed by double quotation marks (“).
- Configuration Database: Name of the BizTalk Management database for the group, “BizTalkMgmtDb” by default.
- Server: Name of the SQL Server instance that hosts the BizTalk Management database on the local computer. In a single-computer installation, this is usually the name of the local computer. Note: If you move this BizTalk project to a different computer, you probably will need to modify the Server property to reflect the new computer name before you will be able to deploy the assembly.
Note: there are other properties but these three (3) are the most important ones (see the full list of properties here: How to Set Deployment Properties in Visual Studio)
- Save the file and then redeploy the BizTalk Server solution (or project).
