In the last blog post, we analyzed the report capabilities of BizTalk NoS Ultimate – Reflector and Refactor. Today, we will continue to analyze the list of available features present in this Visual Studio extension, focusing on the BizTalk developer tools and daily BizTalk Developer’s improved tasks.
These are, what I call, simple tasks that will improve the BizTalk developer experience which will reduce the development and deployment time in new or existent BizTalk projects.
You are probably thinking, why do I need another Build option? The reason is simple: sometimes we have a huge solution with several projects inside, and in these situations trying to build one simple project with the out-of-the-box Visual Studio option can be a challenge. It will take a huge amount of time trying to build the project because of all of the dependencies.
The option in NoS will build the desired project without any interaction with the Visual Studio design environment, making this operation faster than the native build operation in Visual Studio.
You can access these features by:
How many times have you desired to have a simple easy and quick way to install a DLL, and (why not) also uninstall, in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), and why not directly from your favourite developer tool: Visual Studio? Instead, we need to install DLL’s using the Gacutil.exe tool, and don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent tool, but it is not practical in the day-by-day work!
Finally, now you have this option!
You can access these features by:
Note: This works with all DLL’s, it doesn’t have to be a BizTalk DLL, you can easily register a C# Helper Class used by BizTalk Projects into the GAC with this functionality.
Again you are probably thinking, why do I need another Deploy option? And the reasons are exactly the same as the Build project option which we described earlier.
This operation will deploy a single BizTalk assembly directly from the Visual Studio without trying to deploy also all of its BizTalk Server project dependencies.
You can access these features by:
The equivalent we have to this feature is the add/update resources from the BizTalk Server administration console.
What’s the purpose of this feature? In some situations, you just simply don’t want to use the Visual Studio out-of-the-box functionality, as it will deploy all the dependencies and other stuff which will take a huge amount of time. What we want sometimes is only to deploy one specific assembly easily and fast.
This option will allow you to make this directly from Visual Studio, making this operation faster than the native deploy operation on Visual Studio.
I hope you are enjoying these features and stay tuned because this extension has more! Feel free to try this amazing extension for BizTalk Server here: Download BizTalk NoS Ultimate for BizTalk Server 2020.