BizTalk NoS Ultimate: Features Overview (Part I)

Published on : May 5, 2020

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Sandro

Author

BizTalk NoS Ultimate was just released for BizTalk Server 2020. This Visual Studio extension is available for the following versions:

  • BizTalk Server 2020 – Visual Studio 2019
  • BizTalk Server 2016 – Visual Studio 2015
  • BizTalk Server 2013 R2 – Visual Studio 2013
  • BizTalk Server 2013 – Visual Studio 2012

As I mentioned in previous posts, the purpose of BizTalk NoS Ultimate is to mainly help all BizTalk developers, but why not also all BizTalk administrators, in a lot of different day-to-day situations, by improving the BizTalk developer tool experience. By doing so you reduce the development time in new or existing BizTalk projects but also in the analysis, troubleshoot, and documentation experience.

BizTalk NoS Ultimate provides several functionalities like:

  • Quick search inside artifacts
  • Fast register/unregister in GAC
  • Find critical, internal, or external dependencies
  • JackHammering, which will compare your Visual Studio artifacts with the artifacts deployed in any of your BizTalk environment
  • Extract the artifacts (Orchestration, map, schema, and so on) from the BizTalk environment and put it in a Visual Studio solution
  • Many more functionalities like testing your pipeline in Visual Studio in a simple and fast way

Several features are useful in our day by day work and a time saver in a lot of situations.

So, with the release of this new version, I think it is now a good time to start making a walk through all the available features that this extension has to offer.

Expand Solution

Let’s start with the basic new functionalities that are available in the context of the solution. Collapsing a solution is now a default option available in Visual Studio.

However, quickly expanding all project of a solution it isn’t:

  • Expand Solution – This option will fully expand all the projects in your current solution. This feature can be useful when you want an easy and simple way to have a visualization of the entire structure of the solution.

You can access this feature on the Solution Explorer window menu.

Wild Card Search

I think the name explains the feature itself. This feature will perform a full-text search in all the artifacts of your entire solution, which means that, for example, in schemas, it will search for elements, records, and attributes but also for properties of the schema or map itself. In orchestrations, it will search for shape names, message names, variable names, and so on.

The best way to explain the mode of how this operation works or to find an analogy is: inside Visual Studio, open the artifact (schema, map, orchestration, and so on) with XML (text) Editor and make a search inside that artifact. Now think of this process, automatically, to all artifacts of your solution.

We can also call this as a SearchSelectionOpen it operation.

All the artifacts in your entire solution that meet the search requirement will be selected and you will have the option to open them all automatically after the search has finished.

Once again, you can access this feature in the Solution Explorer window menu.

As an example, if I do a Wild Card Search in my solution for ‘Map’ and select Ignore Case, below screenshot will show the outcome. All the artifacts (including folders) that contain the word Map, in any part, will be highlighted in your solution.

You may see in the picture above, that the PessoaOrigem.xsd schema file is selected and if you open it, you will not see any record or element that contains Map word. However, the target namespace contains this word and for that reason, it is being shown on the outcome result of the wild search.

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.