Deployment Best Practices

You can minimize deployment problems by following these best practices:

· Group related artifacts together in a single application. This simplifies management and provides a logical grouping of similar functionality, making troubleshooting easier.

· Deploy shared artifacts in a separate application. Only one artifact having the same locally unique identifier (consisting of the artifact name and possibly other attributes) can exist in a BizTalk group. By storing shared artifacts like schemas in their own application, you have finer control over dependencies.

· Deploy a shared Web site in a separate application. If you are deploying a Web site that will be shared by more than one solution, deploy it as a separate application. If it were shared and part of another application, its virtual directory would be removed when that application was removed. The Web site would stop working and any applications relying on it would stop working.

· Never deploy an assembly to a production computer from Visual Studio. During deployment, Visual Studio may undeploy, unbind, stop, and unenlist artifacts contained in project assemblies, causing unexpected and undesired consequences in a production environment. Never install Visual Studio on the production computer and never refer to a production database from a computer running Visual Studio.

Source: Microsoft