Yes, today we are stepping into our magic time machine, and going back to BizTalk 2004. Why? Because that’s what I had to do at work today. And I forgot a few basics from that long ago time. I needed to test a map in Visual Studio – and I was totally lost. I googled, couldn’t find anything easily. Had to ask a co-worker, even though I used BizTalk 2004 and even used to teach it. Thus the reason for this blog.

The trick is that you have to do right-click (on the map) then click “Properties”. A separate “Properties Window” pops-up, different than the Visual Studio component properties (that we are used to seeing by default in the lower right corner of the screen).

Here’s what it looks like:

The properties screen looks like this:

From there just type or paste your filename in the “TestMap Input Instance”. Then later, when you do a right-click “Test Map” on your map, that’s the file it will use for input.

Just to compare, in BT2010 with VS2010, it looks like this:

You still use the Output window to see the results of the test-map, CNTL-CLICK on the output file name to open it and see the results. If you get a lot of errors or warnings, you could try setting “Validate TestMap Input” and “Validate TestMap Output” to False.