MSBuild is the new build platform for Visual Studios. It allows great flexibility, customization (through creating custom Tasks), and integration with unit tests.
While MSBuild doesn’t directly support building BizTalk solutions, tasks are available to call the DEVENV executable and Microsoft UK has released a set of custom tasks to support a wide verity of common BizTalk tasks (available on GotDotNet). This provided an easy method for scripting automated or ad-hock BizTalk builds and deployments using MSBuild.
What can MSBuild do for you?
– Allow for automated and scheduled builds of your BizTalk code
– Extract code from Team Foundation Server (or other source control)
– Run unit tests
– Deploy BizTalk code to local or remote servers
– Control your overall BizTalk deployment by removing past solutions, stopping applications, and terminating Orchestrations
I have put together a sample to show the power and flexibility of using MSBuild for you BizTalk Build, Deployment, and Undeployment.
Download: BizTalk 2006 Build and Deployment with MSBuild
(Note the download included the custom BizTalk task binary files from GotDotNet and required license file.)
This solution provides a sample of how to set up a MSBuild script to build, deploy, and undeploy a BizTalk 2006 Solution. This solution has multiple projects and custom .net code. I also use MSBuild to create all required Send and Receive Ports and bind them to the Orchestration.
The whole build and deployment process does not use a MSI or a binding file. Although, I would have used a binding file but I wasn’t able to get the custom task to work correctly. This approach might not be the best solution to your deployment needs, but is intended to show you what can be done and how.
To run the sample, it must be extracted to your C drive unless you manually edit the configuration files. Once extracted, open a Visual Studio 2005 command window, change your path to C:\SampleDeployment, and type: MSBuild Build.proj to build and deploy the code. To undeploy the solution type: MSBuild UnDeploy.proj
The Build.proj will automatically do an undeployment if needed. This sample has only been tested with a local deployment and I was not able to get it to work remotely on my home environment. I need to do some more research on this.
In case you get lost in all the files, the FullBuild.proj is the full undeploy, build, and deploy in one file. All MSBuild files have been commented so it should be easy to follow what is going on.
<P