BizTalk Leaving Developers Hanging

I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to track down information on integrating BizTalk development projects with Visual Studio 2008. For the record, you currently can not work with BizTalk projects in Visual Studio 2008 or the Visual Studio 2005 “express” editions.  That’s the official word and I haven’t found any work arounds. 

Let’s back up a minute. I recently received a new laptop from work (cheers for a new Thinkpad… woot!), and I needed to re-install software. I decided that with this new environment I’d be solely focused on the 2008+ stack (Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, etc.) and leave the 2005 stack off. I also need to have the BizTalk developer tools installed for working with BizTalk projects. The BizTalk installer flat out refused to give me the option to install the developer tools since it couldn’t find Visual Studio 2005. I really didn’t want to run another full version and license of Visual Studio so I decided to try running the express version. No luck there either, the BizTalk installer still will not pick up on it being installed.

Thus if you are a BizTalk developer don’t plan on jumping to Visual Studio 2008 just yet. There is a MS event webinar coming up on December 16th from Microsoft that will focus on integrating BizTalk Server solution development into the application lifecycle in VSTS 2008.