Map project references

I’ve been seeing a recurring glitch in the Visual Studio IDE, on three different BTS06 development systems (all w2k3/vs2k5/bts06).

If you’re a schema junky you probably have a couple of BizTalk solutions where you’ve got schemas that import other schemas that in turn import other schemas, etc… if not, just bear with me. 8)

I have a solution with my base type schemas in one project, my complex type schemas in another project (that references the first project), and my canonical schemas in a third project (that references the first two projects). If this is a new thought… just think of it like OO for schemas.

If I create yet another project for my maps, and add a reference to the project with the canonical schemas, I’m unable to define what the source or destination schemas for my maps will be… I click the ‘Open Source Schema’ and I see the window try to open, and then its gone! ❗ Poof! 👿 If I just remove the reference to the project that contains the double-deep schemas, then it works fine! 😀 This gets even uglier if I do it from an orchestration transform… the mapper shuts down and I get a message that says ‘A problem occurred while trying to set the \”Sources\” parameter for the IDE’s in-process compiler…’ 😯 Doing this a few times eventually gives the VS IDE a coronary and it shuts down 😈 (running DEVENV.EXE /Log is completely oblivious to the error so I can’t really tell whats going on)

💡 My guess, from watching FileMon as all this goes on, is that a circular reference ensues and the window bites the dust.

Since I work mostly with EDI, I juggle dozens of schemas and try to keep them organized into different projects. However this glitch forces me down one of two paths

1) put everything in one giant project. 😡

2) remove my project references and directly reference the .dll files instead. 😥

While both options solve the problem, the first one creates a nightmare of a project to work with from within the IDE, and the second one leaves me having to build my projects in the correct order manually, since the IDE cannot infer the dependencies unless you reference the projects. This makes debugging a real chore… and anyone who regularly compiles EDI schemas and has to wait through the glacially slow XSD2EDI step knows that you don’t want to waste time doing a build only to turn around and do it again in the right order! 😳

Thoughts and advice appreciated…