Issues with upgrading BizTalk 2013 to R2

I just upgraded 2013 to 2013 R2.

These are the steps.

1. I installed VS 2013 first which is required.
2. I upgraded the HL7 Accelerator.
3. Both upgrades went smoothly.

This are the issues I found.

When creating a new project or opening an existing project in VS 2013, I tried to add a two new schemas and a map.

As you can see in the following figures, the artifacts are missing. The only artifacts available are for HL7.



BizTalk Project Items

 

Schema Files
 

BTAHL7 Schemas

 

I tired this on two Azure VMs. First I upgrade 2013 Standard, Next I upgraded  R2 Standard to Enterprise. I created a new Azure BizTalk 2013 Developer VM and upgraded it to R2 after installing VS 2013. 

Same issue. 

Other Issues

• .
• The ESB Toolkit is now Version 2.3. You cannot upgrade. There is  no documentation on what is new in Version 2.3

Missing Documentation

• The documentation is for the HL7 Accelerator is from BizTalk 2010 as shown below.

HL7 Accelerator Documentation for BizTalk 2013 R2

The BizTalk 2013 / BizTalk 2013 R2 documentation on MSDN states that the HL7 Accelerator now supports the following:

Provides capability to include free-text data as part of the message that can be processed by the HL7 pipelines  

 I cannot find any documentation for this feature anywhere. Nor are there any samples.

Since I work with HL7 this feature is important.

Hopefully the BizTalk Team will release a CU that will resolve these issue. Until then, I will stay with BizTalk 2013.

A new book is in the works

I am co-authoring a new book with Vikas Bhardwaj called "Complete HL7 for Microsoft BizTalk Server". 

The publisher is Apress and we are look at a publication date in July.

As we get closer to the publication date, I will be providing more information on the content..

BizTalk on Fhir

This is the first post in a new series on the use of HL7 Fhir (pronounced fire) with BizTalk.

I am (or rather my company) is a member of HL7 Organization.  Since November of last year I have been working with fhir and have been able to integrate it into BizTalk.

I have taken part in two Fhir Connectathons, one in January and the second in May.

Leslie Sistla, who is the Director of Technology Strategy for Microsoft World-wide Healthcare published an article on the Healthcare blog about what I and Brian Postlethwaite, Senior Solutions Architect at DCA eHealth Solutions did at the May Connectathon.

Beside BizTalk, I have been working with Microsoft Azure,  HealthVault , Office365, and am just getting into CRM 2013. 

In the next post, I will provide a little information on  the background of Fhir and what problems is solves.