In my notes on BizTalk 2009 post I have highlighted the fact that now, as part of the BizTalk installation, you can select the “Project Build Components” which allow you to build BizTalk projects without Visual Studio or BizTalk installed on the build machine.
This is very cool feature of the product, but I have to admit that I have missed something quite important; luckily – Mikael Hakansson hadn’t – the provided tasks do not support deployment of BizTalk projects, but only build (see Mikael’s article here).
What this means is that, while you can use the tasks deployed through the installation to verify that your BizTalk projects build correctly (as part of continuous integration setup, for example), you have no way of verifying that they can be deployed or, more importantly, run any automated tests;
The SDC tasks, with their support for BizTalk deployment, can come in very handy here, and you can certainly use them to augment the built in build support with deployment capabilities, but they add more dependencies to the plate, which has to be planned for.
Of course, attending the MVP summit in Redmond last week we had a great chance of raising this (and various other) subjects with the product group, and we certainly have not let that opportunity go missed, now we just need to wait and see if they “pick up the glove”.