Version 2.6 of the Deployment Framework is now available (see the download links - the full download, core, and tools have all been updated.)  Future work in this area will be about augmenting the already-great deployment story in BizTalk 2006! 

The release notes below will (likely) only be interesting for folks that are using the framework extensively.

Interesting Features:

• If you populate the bizTalkHosts property with the name of the Hosts that you are using, the 'servicecontroller' nant task is used for the stop/start of BizTalk services, with a configurable timeout stored in the 'biztalkHostResetTime' nant property. This requires recopying the BizTalk.nant.tasks.dll to your \program files\nant\bin directory. This alleviates the problem some users were having with timeouts in service restarts.
• IISReset now uses configurable reset time from nant property iisResetTime.
• Modified the sample application to demonstrate how you can maintain adapter configuration in binding files (i.e. the TransportTypeData sections) in its "unescaped" form -- rather than having to maintain it as escaped xml-within-xml. This relies on a new tool - ElementTunnel.exe, which is also in the Tools download. This is a huge help with adapters such as MQSeries that have many configuration elements.  More on this in another post.

Administrivia:

• SSOSettingsFileImport.exe opens files with read access only, eliminating some file locking issues.
• Permissions on the physical directories associated with virtual directories are now granted to the account specified as the application pool account (instead of just aspnet account.)
• Now using NAnt .85 RC3
• Now using log4net 1.2.9 (thanks Campbell McNeill for work on this!)
• Now using the July 2005 release of WiX (thanks to Loren Halvorsen for work on compatibility with this.)
• Now using XmlPreProcess 1.0 RC3 (and the associated SettingsFileGenerator.xls.) One new feature here is the ability to use URLs that contain query strings in the spreadsheet. The name/value pair XML files that are generated will wrap as CDATA where appropriate. Thanks Loren!
• Modified the sample application to demonstrate how file receive and drop locations can be made relative to the a) project directory on a developer workstation or b) installation directory on a server. This has actually be in the sample application before - but it relied on the xmlpoke nant task, whereas now it uses the XmlPreProcess mechanism we use for all other binding file modifications.
• Modified the deployment verification unit test in the sample application to rely on a NUnitUtility helper class that you can pull into your own projects. One included method allows you to examine the event log (on multiple machines) looking for errors that BizTalk might have raised during the test - very handy, and a potentially important component of your test.
• Support for a local_settings file used with XmlPreProcess. It can be handy to have an "environment specific" set of macro values that are particular to a local workstation, and the sample application shows how this is done now.
• Added transforms and schemas to the list of what is re-gac'd for the updateOrchestrations target. See here for more detail. In a recent release, I made changes that allowed for the use of a single binding file, so that binding files as emitted by the deployment wizard could be used (rather than splitting them by hand, which was required early on with the Deployment Framework.) This was a good change…but the implementation broke the "messaging only" scenario (where you have no orchestrations.) I don't have a good fix for this yet. The workaround is as follows: In your project's nant file, set includeOrchestrations to "true" (even though you don't have any), and define the orchestration assembly list to be an empty string, as shown here:
  <property name="includeOrchestrations" value="true" />
<property name="orchestrations" value="" />

How do you upgrade?  Extract the "core" zip file on "top" of your existing project, and then fix up the WiX directory manually (since it will be named BizTalkSample.WiXSetup after the unzip.)  All tools and scripts will be updated as a result.  Then test...Leave a comment with any issues you encounter.  Good luck!