Hey Scott,
I attended this BizTalk User Group that you mentioned in your posting, and I have to say it was very informative and interesting, so thank you for that. We are looking at using your deployment framework in our production environment, but I have a question about how it will work in our setup. We have 4 servers running BizTalk, 2 are used for handling orchestrations, and the other 2 are used for handling messaging (ie. they are the servers where ports are created). If we use the deployment framework in this setup, will it attempt to create the ports on are orchestration servers? If so, is there a way we can tell it not to? Because of the way we're setup, we can't/don't want to create ports on our orchestration servers, we do all that work on the messaging ones. I haven't had much time to use the framework outside of our development setup so I don't know if this a simple problem/solution. Thanks!

When you ask "will it attempt to create the ports on the orchestration servers?" -- can you elaborate?
Port definitions are created within the management database for the BizTalk group - not on individual servers. If the handlers for the transports you are using only have host instances on two of your four servers, that will work just fine.

The deployment framework does, by default, attempt to create virtual directories on all servers if you indicate that vdirs are necessary (for SOAP or HTTP adapter work.) You can customize that behavior if need be.

There is never such a thing as too much pizza. Kinda like saying there is too much beer...

http://duckdown.blogspot.com/

Is it possible to use the Deployment Framework to deploy Adapter Handler configurations that are shared for all ports. e.g. the default SMTP Host

thanks,
craig

You will want to look at the MSBTS_ReceiveHandler and the MSBTS_SendHandler classes (WMI) to affect the defaults.