Adding custom "views" to BizTalk administration console

Question

Has anyone worked out how to add custom UI "views" to the BizTalk administration console ?

For example custom nodes on the tree, or custom tabs on the Group Overview showing custom data eg state of services etc ?

My customer's system has a number of services and other parts which would be nice to give system administrators an single overview of the whole system from a single application, without having to duplicate the biztalk application console.

Answer 1

It is possible, though how easy depends on what you want to do. The BizTalk admin console (at least up to R2, not sure bout 2009) was based on MMC 2.0, so you need to use the MMC SDK and do a bunch of COM interop stuff.

There's a sample on it in the SDK: Extending the BizTalk Server Administration Console:

This sample demonstrates how to use the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) to extend the functionality of the BizTalk Server Administration console with your own custom menu items, node items, new data items and views, or different views of existing data.