Everywhere I go now, the first thing I do before I do anything else, is install these two hotfixes. They solve a bunch of extremely painful BizTalk 2009 development issues.

BizTalk Server 2009 Orchestration Designer incorrectly indicates that there is an error in a BizTalk Server 2009 project http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=979153

You experience various problems when you develop a BizTalk project that references another BizTalk project in Visual Studio on a computer that is running BizTalk Server 2009
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=977428

One gotchya to watch out for is that if you do a repair of either BizTalk or Visual Studio, (or in our case recently, reinstalled VS2008 SP1 in order to get the TFS client working) you will have to reinstall these hotfixes as well.

EDIT: 10/10/2011. I get requests for this tool from time to time as the link has been broken. I’ve re-uploaded the file and the link has been fixed. (We don’t use this tool anymore – we’ve switched the Microsoft one but I’m sharing this for legacy support reasons.)

EDIT: June 22 2010. Not long after posting this I became aware of this tool from Microsoft. Unbelievably Microsoft seems to have released this last year and not told anybody about it. As far as I can tell hardly anyone is using this yet. I would suggest using this tool is probably a better solution than the Seroter style one we at Burch Consulting built. END EDIT

In the BizTalk world we’ve been using the BizTalk SSO configuration tool for about 3 years now. Richard Seroter supplied the original here: http://seroter.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/biztalk-sso-configuration-data-storage-tool/

The problem with this tool was that you couldn’t add fields to an existing application and you couldn’t export/import the field values (only the field list). So we’ve fixed all that. We’ve also added a pick list of configured applications (which behind the scenes is also stored in SSO) so you can use a drop down to retrieve applications settings. (Only applications that this tool saves will be available in the pick list. For pre-existing applications you’ll have to type in the application name to retrieve them the first time).

The tool is for download it Here

(Visual Studio 2008 webforms application)

Let me know if you’ve got any feedback.