BizTalk: Can't Open the Type Picker

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Well now this is an odd little problem. I was working on a BizTalk Server project recently and needed to promote some properties to the messaging engine. The normal scenario is to do the following:

Right-click in the schema and select 'Promote > Show Promotions...'
Click the 'Property Fields' tab
Click the little folder to open our property schema that we have already built.
Select the property schema in the dialogue and click OK.
Assign our fields

Now, I ran in to a problem here and I have yet to find the cause or a fix. Basically, I don't get the dialogue to select my property schema. It kind of tries to open, but never really quite gets there and closes the Promote Properties dialogue box for good measure when it fails. Nothing goes to the event log either - which is nice and handy.

What I have had to do is resort to manually editing the XSD files in and XML editor to add a reference to my property schema so that I can use it to promote the properties. You can to this by adding the following to the document element/root node of your XSD files:

xmlns:ns0="http://Company.Project.ERP.PropertySchema"

And then in then add the following to your XSD right after your document element:

<xs:annotation>
  <xs:appinfo>
    <b:imports xmlns:b="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003">
      <b:namespace prefix="ns0" uri="http://Company.Project.ERP.PropertySchema" location=".\PropertySchema.xsd" /> 
    </b:imports>
  </xs:appinfo>
</xs:annotation>

This should have things up an running so that you can now promote your properties as property fields.

When I find the cause (and of course the fix) I'll post it here.

UPDATE (29/04/2008)

So, I found a little more information on this issue. It seems to effect anything that requires the BizTalk Type Picker to open (selecting property schemas, creating/modifying maps and so on). I found this post on tech-archive from Colin Bowern who has also had this problem. It seems that for me, I was referencing two helper classes in my project that contained the schemas. As soon as I remove these references I can select schemas and such at will. But as COlin say,s it's not a great fix as I then have to put the references back.

Again, when I find an absolute cause and a fix, I'll update this post.