This blog is a quick tip on how to run an old version of the BizTalk Documenter with a newer version of BizTalk. I hope this might be useful with the pending release of BizTalk Server 2020.
An excellent post by Vierodan prompted me to add this tip. For a summary of my own posts about the BizTalk Documenter see https://www.connected-pawns.com/2017/04/07/biztalk-documenter-moved-github/
The reason why the BizTalk Documenter breaks between BizTalk versions is because the version of Microsoft.BizTalk.Interop.SSOClient changes. On GitHub Coen Dijkgraaf and myself provide different compilations for each BizTalk version going back to BizTalk 2006. This is completely unnecessary because a simple assembly binding tweak allows older versions to be used with newer versions of BizTalk.
After doing an in place upgrade of BizTalk 2013 R2 to BizTalk 2016, I simply added the binding redirect below to the Microsoft.Services.Tools.BiztalkDocumenter.exe.config and the old version of the BizTalk documenter continued work.
I am not sure whether Coen and I will release a new version of the BizTalk Documenter for BizTalk 2020 but hopefully you can use an older version by using the same trick.
Conclusion
What is the future of the BizTalk Documenter? The current codebase is still un-finished business. There is still many partially implemented features and bugs. There has been no releases for a while and that makes me feel bad. Maybe just maybe I might work on a refresh for BizTalk 2020. So if you want some changes or enhancements please do a pull request the GitHub repository.
