To Side-By-Side Or Not Side-by-Side With Whidbey And BTS 2004?

On one of my boxes, on which I was running BizTalk Server 2004, I recently installed Whidbey Beta 1. WHen I was doing some BizTalk development on that box, I noticed that BizTalk will sometimes not process any responses from Web services using the RPC/encoded message style, regardless if they are built with Apache Axis or .NET. The receive action will never finish even though the service sends a valid response.

Upon further research, I found that the BizTalk Windows Service, BTSNTSvc.exe, loads the Whidbey assemblies and runtime, not the .NET 1.1 versions. So far, I thought that fusion would load the exact matching assembly if it was available (at least for string-named assemblies such as the ones that are part of the .NET runtime) even if there were newer versions available, but for some reason that's not true for BizTalk. The 2.0 libraries are loaded as soon as the service starts. I didn't see any publisher policies that would redirect the 1.1 assemblies ... I certainly would hope that a beta 1 release doesn't install any.

Does anybody happen to know what makes BizTalk special wrt assembly loading?

1 Comment

  • One thought: if the entity loading .NET is unmanaged code, you will ALWAYS get the latest version of the runtime.



    We learned this the hard way with <OBJECT> tags loading .NET assemblies in IE. Works great, until someone-- anyone-- installs a new version of the framework, then boom. You get that version whether you want it or not. Why? Because IE is unmanaged code.

Comments have been disabled for this content.