How to Publish an ODX on a machine without BTS

Recently I got this question from a client and even thought the answer is no, it is still very confusing when wadding through all of the documentation.

This is the question: Can I deploy/host an orchestration as a web service to a machine that does not have BizTalk Server installed on it?

If you look at the BizTalk documentation, the answer seems a little bit deceiving:


They indicated that there is no Biztalk needed. However, once you keep reading more, it mentioned that you need to have a reverse proxy setup for this setup to work.

Ok, so what if you try deploying the orchestration as a web service, using the Web Services Publishing wizard? Here is the answer:

I took one of the samples from the SDK: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\SDK\Samples\Orchestrations\ExposeWebService

I make sure it worked in the localhost. Then I went and published to an Windows 2003 Server that was setup as an application server only [no Biztalk installed]. The web publishing wizard did not report any errors and it completed deploying the service.

Once I tried calling this service, this is what I got:



The error message clearly states: Could not load file or assembly 'microsoft.biztalk.webservices.Serverproxy, .... '. So it is looking for this assembly: Microsoft.BizTalk.WebServices.ServerProxy.dll. This seems obvious that you cannot just copy the missing assembly over to this server without breaking some EULA's ;)