Martijn's blog - E-Commerce, EAI, BizTalk and .NET

2006/01/25

BizTalk Server 2006 - Pipeline Component Side-By-Side deployment

In BizTalk Server 2004, it was impossible to perform a side-by-side deployment of pipeline components (if someone knows an approach to implement this without renaming the assembly, please let me know ;-) ). Every aspect of BizTalk Server components was deployed into the GAC, but the pipeline components themselfs.

It turns out, however, the team did a tremendous job in altering this 'feature' to support GAC-ed pipeline components within BizTalk Server 2006. The trick to enable this is to:

  • Version the pipeline component (sign the assembly)
  • reference the component by placing it into the "Pipeline Components" folder at development time in order to use it in your pipelines
  • remove it from this folder after building the pipeline or in deploying your solution to production
  • GAC the component
The compiled pipeline assembly will reference the correct version and the AppDomain used by BizTalk Server 2006 will search the GAC before resorting to it's private paths, amongst which is the "Pipeline Components" folder.

2 Comments:

  • nice work !

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:00 AM  

  • This isn't a BizTalk feature - this is a .NET 2.0 feature that causes Assembly.LoadFrom (which is what the pipeline infrastructure is using) to load matching assemblies from the Gac. In .nET 1.1 LoadFrom would only load things from the location specified in the method call.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:49 PM  

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