Open source Tools will help you boost your development productivity in a BizTalk Project. These are the tools you need!
All of the Tools except for DebugView can be downloaded from CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com).
Deployment Framework for BizTalk
The Deployment Framework for BizTalk provides you with a best practice approach on how to structure your BizTalk Visual Studio solution and manage your deployment.
Once set up correctly, the Deployment Framework will allow you to deploy or create deployment packages (MSI Installer Files) by the click of a button. This helps you to reduce post-deployment configuration tasks to a minimum and allows non-BizTalk people, such as server administrators to install a BizTalk solution easily.
IMPORTANT: Be aware that using the Deployment Framework for BizTalk should be decided BEFORE you set up your solution in Visual Studio. The reason is that you need to set up the solution as described in the deployment framework documentation.
BizTalk Best Practice Analyzer
The Best Practice Analyzer is a handy tool that analyzes your entire BizTalk Installation and configuration. It provides you with a report where to turn the knobs and push the buttons to optimize your environment.
BizTalk Orchestration Profiler
If you have Orchestrations that need too much time and you can not figure out why or where, the Orchestration Profiler is the tool of your choice. It will help you analyze an orchestration and show you all the steps involved and their execution time. This will help you find the bottlenecks and show you where to start further investigations. The Orchestration Profiler pulls data from the BizTalk Management Database and Tracking Database and creates a nice graphical report with the following components:
An overview about the instances of your orchestrations and their execution times plus a pie chart about the coverage factor.
A graphical representation of your orchestration shapes including a success rate indicator.
A detailed report showing details for every shape in your orchestration. Here you will find out where you spend those lost seconds.
DebugView
DebugView is a simple windows forms application that will show all the output that is written to the Debug Console using System.Diagnostics.Debug.Writeline() on the local computer. This allows you to write trace statements in your orchestration and watch them appear in the DebugView Window. Note that this will work even on an production environment without Visual Studio installed or a debugger attached (provided the source is compiled with the “debug” switch).