An outside-of-Visual-Studio-BizTalk Explorer

Are you using BizTalk Server 2004 and discuss if Visual Studio should be installed on production server? Then I've got the tool for you!

More than once I've had discussions with customers about the need to use Visual Studio to manage BizTalk Server 2004 solutions. There is no absolute need to use Visual Studio but it helps if you need to verify that your deployment has been successful. Installing Visual Studio always starts the pain process for the people who are responsible for the production servers, and I can only explain their options...

But two weeks ago one of my customers showed me a tool which is described as "an outside-of-Visual-Studio-Biztalk Explorer". This is a tools that looks so similar to BizTalk Explorer in Visual Studio that I wonder if they are somehow hosting that tool in their own UI, but probably they have only been "inspired" by the look-and-feel.

I must admit that I have not really used this tool, we installed it and then used it to examine the deployed application which took perhaps 30 minutes. But the person who told me about the tool say that it works great.

You can download the tool here: https://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=c2bd2cac-6fd8-4ee5-b524-4dcba88f7464

For those of you who are not familiar with BizTalk I must end by saying that BizTalk Server 2006 has solved the problem discussed above. BizTalk Server 2006 comes with an MMC called BizTalk Server Administration which allow you to perform all types of configuration and administration. So this post only applies to BizTalk Server 2004 customers.