BizTalk Server 2004 Development noob question 1

[fiveeuros]

Hi,

I've been reading up on BizTalk Server 2004 as I have to prepare a feasibility report for my manager. Everything I've seen has been to do with the (lengthy) installation process and prerequisites - however I have a (hopefully) simple question regarding development that I can't find a straight answer for:

If BizTalk Server 2004 is installed on one of our company servers (Windows Server 2003), how do developers sitting at their workstations (Windows 2000) develop using it? I understand that it's integrated into Visual Studio (which the developer workstations have), but I can't find anything that documents the steps needed to achieve this integration - and given the size of the installation process I don't want to nake the assumption that it is simple.

If anyone could point me towards a link or links, or would mind taking the time to describe this process in their own words, I would be very grateful.

Regards & thanks for your time,
fiveeuros

 

[SgtPeppa]

Hi, I have not done this for a long time, so I might not recall every required step. We usualy just use Virtual Machines for developing and testing our solution, which seems to be the easiest way.

But anyway here it goes:

If you have BizTalk installed and set up (ConfigFramework.exe) properly on your Server, all your developers must install is the developer tools only from BizTalk. This sets up your Visual Studio. You can then develop normal.

Deployment is a little more work.
If you open your BizTalk Explorer inside Visual Studio the first time it will not find the BizTalk Management DB which is the Place where all "Settings" for BizTalk are stored. You will need to point it to the installation on your server. If you then hit Build/Deploy on your visual studio it will set up all files on your server,but......

The .dll Files will not be copied into the GAC, which is the place where they need to be. So you will have to place the files there yourself. This is not possible remotely, casue of the .NET Framework Security restrictions.

I hope I did not miss any step, since its been a long time using a Dev Environment like that!

Hope that helps, and good luck for your report,

Stephan