One of our clients was experiencing a weird issue when developing a custom pipeline component. In their case, they were making a custom pipeline using the HL7 Disassembler and Assembler pipeline components. This component has a property of “Allow Trailing Delimiter” which is defaulted to False. Everything looked good until we deployed to BizTalk and went to configure the pipeline, the property was no longer available.
This was weird because the property was clearly shown on the Pipeline Designer. We double-checked that everything was properly deployed and all of our components were in the GAC. Everything looked fine. We opened up the pipeline component file (*.btp) using Notepad++ and looked at the contents.
The properties element was empty. Even with this, I figured that BizTalk would just default to using the properties default values instead of not listing them whatsoever. We went back to the Pipeline Designer and changed the property value to true.
We saved the pipeline and rebuilt the solution. Before we deployed, we opened up the Pipeline file again in Notepad++ and this time, the properties element was properly populated.
Everything was looking good, so we deployed to BizTalk and this time all the properties were set properly.
I am not sure if this behavior is limited to only BizTalk 2006, but we will be doing some testing with BizTalk 2009 and 2010 to see if we get the same results.
I hope this helps someone with debugging custom pipelines.