BizTalk Server 2006 Custom Functoid Documentation Mistake

When you develop a custom functoid, there are 5 important tasks to do:

1. Create a resource file with the various resources such as functoid’s name, description, tooltip and icon.
2. Create the class that will implement the functoid. This class must derive from the Microsoft.BizTalk.BaseFunctoids.BaseFunctoid class.The constructor must override the bas class constructor and call a certain number of methods and properties so that the custom functoid can run properly at run-time as well as integrate well into the Visual Studio’s mapper.
3. Create a member method in the functoid class that will actually implement the functionality of the custom functoid (its business logic).
4. Compile and sign the functoid project into an assembly with a strong name key file (so that the assembly containing the custom functoid can be deployed in the GAC).
5. Copy the assembly to C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions and add the functoid in Visual Studio’s ToolBox. You must also install the assembly into the GAC so that the functoid is available to BizTalk at runtime.

Today I found out that the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation has a mistake in the custom functoid development section: Using BaseFunctoid, which relates to the point number 2 in my previous list of tasks.
That section says that the constructor of the functoid must make a call to the SetupResourceAssembly method to point to the resource assembly. It details:

Include a resource file with your project. If building with Visual Studio, the resource assembly must be ProjectName.ResourceName.

In my experience this is not true, when I build my custom functoid assembly in Visual Studio, I have to call the SetupResourceAssembly method with FunctoidNameSpace.ResourceName as parameter instead of ProjectName.ResourceName. If I follow the documentation’s advice, the resource information such as functoid’s name and icon do not appear in Visual Studio’s toolbox, proving that the resources could not be found by the IDE.

The only case that it would work as mentioned in the documentation would be if the project name and the namespace of the functoid were identical, which happens by default in Visual Studio. Indeed, when you create a new project with Visual Studio 2005, a default namespace will be created for the project, its value being the project name. You can see the default namespace value by right-clicking on your project files and click “properties”.