Will/Does Visual Studio 2013 support BizTalk 2013 projects?

Question

In my limited experience with BizTalk it seems that BizTalk projects and Visual Studio version are somewhat locked to each other. For example, you can't open a BizTalk 2010 project in Visual Studio 2012, you have to have BizTalk 2013 components installed on your development machine in order to do so.

So, my question is this, will Visual Studio 2013 support BizTalk 2013 projects (or even possibly BizTalk 2010 projects for that matter) or will we be stuck using VS 2012 for BT projects?

Edit: I had previously added an answer as follows:

Sheesh, I don't know what Google search terms I was using before, but for some reason I couldn't find the information on BizTalk. I tried again and came up with this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh266747.aspx

Which states:

BizTalk server projects are not compatible with Visual Studio 2013. The first time you open a BizTalk 2010 project, it is automatically upgraded to the BizTalk 2013/Visual Studio 2013 project system.

So this means VS 2013 should work with BizTalk 2013 projects. Nice. I can't say I've tried it yet, but this is good news.

I've since installed BizTalk 2013 and Visual Studio 2013

I now get the error message:

this project is incompatible with the current version of Visual Studio

I've since done a repair on the BizTalk2013 install in order to ensure I have Developer tools and it has had no effect. Can anyone confirm from experience that this should be working for me?

Answer 1

The new BizTalk 2013 R2 will support VS 2013: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj248703(v=bts.80).aspx

• BizTalk 2013 R2 projects require Visual Studio 2013
• BizTalk 2013 projects require Visual Studio 2012
• BizTalk 2010 projects require Visual Studio 2010

Answer 2

As of today (Nov 5, 2013) it does not. It appears that there is a 6 month lag between releases, so we can expect it to be supported in several months. For now, you'll have to stick to 2010 or 2012.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalknotes/archive/2013/10/29/biztalk-2013-compatibility-with-latest-platforms-of-microsoft.aspx