Will/Does Visual Studio 2013 support BizTalk 2013

Question

In my limited experience with BizTalk it seems that BizTalk projects and Visual Studio version are somewhat locked to each other. For example, you can't open a BizTalk 2010 project in Visual Studio 2012, you have to have BizTalk 2013 components installed on your development machine in order to do so.

So, my question is this, will Visual Studio 2013 support BizTalk 2013 projects (or even possibly BizTalk 2010 projects for that matter) or will we be stuck using VS 2012 for BT projects?

Edit: I had previously added an answer as follows:

Sheesh, I don't know what Google search terms I was using before, but for some reason I couldn't find the information on BizTalk. I tried again and came up with this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh266747.aspx

Which states:

BizTalk server projects are not compatible with Visual Studio 2013. The first time you open a BizTalk 2010 project, it is automatically upgraded to the BizTalk 2013/Visual Studio 2013 project system.

So this means VS 2013 should work with BizTalk 2013 projects. Nice. I can't say I've tried it yet, but this is good news.

I've since installed BizTalk 2013 and Visual Studio 2013

I now get the error message:

this project is incompatible with the current version of Visual Studio

I've since done a repair on the BizTalk2013 install in order to ensure I have Developer tools and it has had no effect. Can anyone confirm from experience that this should be working for me?

Answer 1

I had a related problem today. I tried to use VS2013 Ultimate to open a BizTalk 2013r2 solution - which should work fine. I received the dreaded Unsupported message. It turned out that the problem was caused by the fact "Developer Tools and SDK" was left unchecked during the BizTalk installation.

To resolve I mounted the BizTalk Iso and ran the setup.exe. I selected Modify Existing Installation then checked the box for "Developer Tools and SDK"

Answer 2

The new BizTalk 2013 R2 will support VS 2013: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj248703(v=bts.80).aspx

• BizTalk 2013 R2 projects require Visual Studio 2013
• BizTalk 2013 projects require Visual Studio 2012
• BizTalk 2010 projects require Visual Studio 2010

Answer 3

As of today (Nov 5, 2013) it does not. It appears that there is a 6 month lag between releases, so we can expect it to be supported in several months. For now, you'll have to stick to 2010 or 2012.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalknotes/archive/2013/10/29/biztalk-2013-compatibility-with-latest-platforms-of-microsoft.aspx

Answer 4

BizTalk 2013 /2013 R2 Project Templates with Visual Studio 2015

Hello, yes, the Setup of the BizTalk 2013 requires for the feature'Developer tools & SDK' per default Visual Studio 2012, and the Setup of BizTalk 2013 R2 Visual Studio 2013, otherwise the feature is disabled.

Frustrated with this fact (at work we have now upgraded to VS2015), i now find a way to install the templates under VS 2015 and without an installation of VS2012/ 2013 at the system.

Tool required: Orca to modify the msi.

Files to modify are located in subdir MSI of the BTServer dir of the extracted ISO (make a backup of these files!)

Installations to modify: Microsoft BizTalk Server.msi and
Microsoft BizTalk Server64.msi

Modifications:
AppSearch-Table: Drop Row for the property 'CSHARP_INSTALLED'
Properties-Table: Add Row, property Name = 'CSHARP_INSTALLED', Value = 'True'
Properties-Table: Set the value of the property 'TargetVsVersion' to '14.0'

Do this for both MSI's, save.

Now, the Prerequirement VS 2012/ 2013 from the files
Setup.xml and
Setup_64.xml must be removed.

Simple remove the entry

<RequiredComponent Name="VS2012"/> or
<RequiredComponent Name="VS2013"/>

from the node

<Feature Name="Development">

DONE!

Hope, this helps someone :-) Have fun!
best regards, Marko

---EDIT if someone has a valid RegKey to check if VS215 is installed, the Check in the Setup.xml can rewritten to this. This would be nice and valid

One valid modified Search for a Visual Studio 2015 installation could be:

<PlatformComponent _locAttrData="DisplayName" _locID="25" Name="VS2015" DisplayName="Microsoft Visual Studio 2015"> <Detection Type="RegDWORD"> <DetectKey Root="HKLM" Key="SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Setup\Visual Studio 2015 Prerequisites" Value="InstallSuccess" ValueData="1"/> </Detection> </PlatformComponent>

Answer 5

I ran into the same issue but installing Visual Studio 2012 did not resolve the problem for me I was still getting that error message. I just figured out that during the BizTalk install I did not check the check box for Developer Tools and SDK. Once I modified the installation and checked that box the project will open for me now.