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    July 17

    BizTalk 2006 R2 on Visual Studio 2008 Workaround

    Lately I have been reading about new .NET 3.5 features and have been trying to keep up with LINQ and the ADO.NET Entity framework. As a BizTalk developer, it is quite difficult keeping up to date with all of the advances in WCF or BizTalk services (aka the Internet Service Bus - ISB). A significant challenge lately in keeping up to date is that the BizTalk Visual Studio extensions work with VS 2005 but not with VS 2008. If you try to install BizTalk 2006 R2 onto a system with only VS 2008 you get an error message because the extensions cannot be installed.
     
    So I came up with a workaround. I took a VPC that had BizTalk 2006 R2 with VS 2005 on it and then installed VS 2008 to a separate folder than VS 2005. I was able to install and run both side-by-side. I tested the VS 2005 extensions and they are still intact.
     
    So it is a little inconvenient to run both VS 2005 and 2008 on the same box and not be able to deploy directly from VS 2008 to BizTalk, but not horrible. So here is an ordered list of software I installed to get it to work:
     
    • Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2
    • SQL Server 2005
    • Visual Studio 2005
    • Visual Studio 2005 SP1
    • BizTalk Server 2006 R2
    • Visual Studio 2008
    If anyone encounters issues with this configuration, please let me know.
     
    Thanks,
     
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