In the last few weeks I have been doing BizTalk project migrations successfully from BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 to recent version: BizTalk Server 2010/VS 2010 or BizTalk Server 2013/VS2012. In most of the scenario this is a simple task and regarding to Visual Studio we basically just need to open the “old” solution with the “new” Visual Studio and it will try to convert the solution using the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard tool, check more details in one of my previous post: BizTalk 2010 – Migrate an old BizTalk Visual Studio solution to Visual Studio 2010.
Of course this part is just the Visual Studio project migration, and in some cases we need to make adjustments to our solution.
However recently I face a strange problem when I was trying to convert the Visual Studio solution, every time I tried it gave me the following error:
“Unable to read the project file “…\MyProject.btproj.user”. The project file could not be loaded. Root element is missing.”
CAUSE
“*.btproj.user” file. This is a XML file that contains not only the BizTalk deployment Settings but also several personal user settings like References path, test file names and so on.
I’m not sure what did happen with this file while copying the project to the new server, or during it’s time life in the former development server. However when I check the file system for this file I noticed that the file was empty:
SOLUTION
To solve this problem you just need to delete this User configuration file (*.btproj.user) from the file system and try to import de project or convert the solution again.
