My misunderstanding about how BizTalk builds MSI packages for applications

A misunderstanding about how BizTalk builds MSI packages for applications caused me some recent heartache.

Let’s say I have a BizTalk “application” with the following resources:



As you can see, I’ve got a BizTalk assembly, a “standard” .NET assembly, binding file, text file, and virtual directory (for a web service). In my simple mind, I see the “Source Location” column, and assume that when I walk through the wizard to build an MSI package, BizTalk goes and grabs the file from that location and jams it into the final package.



I was quite wrong. I learned this when I made updates to my web service and helper components, rebuilt my MSI package, deployed it, and learned to my horror that “old” components had been installed on the destination server. What gives?

Whenever you add a “resource” to a BizTalk application (either by deploying your BizTalk library, or manually adding an artifact), it is added to a CAB file and stored in the database. In the BizTalkMgmtDb database there is an amazingly well-hidden table named adpl_sat which holds these uploaded resources.



You can see in that picture that properties for each artifact are stored (e.g. GAC-ing components on install), and there’s also a column called “cabContent” which stores binary data. Updating artifacts on your file system does NOT mean they will get included in your MSI packages.

So what’s a guy to do? Well, you may have noticed that for most resources, when you right-click and choose “Modify”, there is a button where you can “Refresh”. Now, instead of just refreshing the file from the spot designated in the “Source Location”, it asks you to browse to where the updated file resides. That seems a bit unnecessary, but whatever.


So, that’s how you refresh MOST resources and make sure that your BizTalk application stays in sync with your developed artifacts. A big gotcha is, you CANNOT do this for virtual directories. I can’t seem to identify any way to refresh a modified web service short of removing the resource, and adding it back in. Big pain. Given how crucial web services are to many BizTalk applications, I would think that both adding them as resources (via UI vs. command line), and easily refreshing them, should be a priority for future releases.