I know you can debug orchestrations using attach to process, but that means deploying your code and getting your bindings imported and everything -- just to find that you did something wrong and then you have to do it all over again. With maps, there's just a handy little button called "test map" and it's awesome. Why cant you just right-click an orchestration, and click "test orchestration," and then have it test a canonical message that you already have generated? It would save a ton of time during development.
With that said, does anyone know of any hacks to be able to achieve this? I thought about writing a little console application that looks at your .odx file (which should have the generated C# in it) and tests it with an input message that you specify.
Does anyone have any ideas?
The ODX doesn't contain generated C#. I just contains an XML payload with a lot of properties. Possibly the DLL generated when you compile does, I haven't checked.
The only hack I know of is to use the BTDF tool to do a Quick Deploy, which basically just GACs the DLL's but doesn't deploy to the BizTalk database. Good for small changes to schemas and maps, but will not work so well with Orchestrations as then the Debugger from the Administration console will not show things correctly.