Deploying a BizTalk web service using setup project

Here’s another thing we bumped into recently that took a lot of time to find and fix.

In a project in which I’m sideways involved a BizTalk generated WebService was deployed using a setup project. These projects by default include all dependencies, which are all BizTalk assemblies. Deployed this way, our webservice did not work, without any error logged in either the HAT or the event log. We did see that BizTalk was involved by incomplete messages in the HAT. Turned out that when we removed all dependency assemblies from the bin folder of the webservice it worked great. We choose to remove dependencies from the setup project and that fixed it.