Here is a simple way to open a command window from within Visual Studio that is aware of the BizTalk Management Utility (bm.exe). I have found this useful while working with interceptor configuration files. This tip will add the Visual Studio Command Prompt to the Tools menu.
Nothing too dramatic here, just a time saver when defining interceptor configuration files from within Visual Studio without adding shortcuts on my desktop or quick launch bar.
Add Visual Studio Command Prompt to External Tools
Simply select the External Tools option off of the Tools menu. To keep thing simple, I basically duplicated the Visual Studio Command prompt settings by viewing its properties.
Modify Visual Studio Command Prompt's PATH
Depending on the operating system you are running Visual Studio on, the following will be different. To determine where to modify, open the file indicated in the command arguments. For me it was: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\vcvarsall.bat.
In the file you will see a supplied parameter, e.g., x86, indicates were the settings are located for the specific operating system. Note that %~dp0 indicates the where the batch file was run from. For me it was: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat.
This file just pointed to another file C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat. In this file is where the environment settings are stored. I modified the file to include the location of bm.exe as part of the PATH environment variable. The following line was inserted after the current @set PATH line:
@set PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Tracking;%PATH%