BAM Deployment Issue

I discovered a weird problem recently when deploying a BAM definition spreadsheet using the bm.exe program.

Basically, I was getting multiple message boxes containing fn_GetString in the title, plus some other blank message boxes until finally the process ended. It looked pretty terminal!

The problem turned out to be that on my machine the locale was set to English (United Kingdom) and it looks like the BAM deployment process doesn't like it. The message boxes look like they come from Excel so I guess the BAM Excel spreadsheet macro code is to blame.

Changing the locale to English (United States) solved the issue and the bm.exe program was able to export the BAM definition XML successfully from the spreadsheet.

However, I came across another problem. I was running the bm.exe program from the folder that contained my spreadsheet. This folder is different to the BAM folder in the installation folder: \Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\Tracking. An error occurred which said that it couldn't find the BamConfiguration.xml file in the current folder. It seems that it created it back in the BizTalk installation folder, so no wonder!

So, I copied the spreadsheet into the Tracking folder of BizTalk, ran the BAM deployment and it worked!

So I guess the morale of this tale is don't try and be creative with the tools. As long as you live in the US and don't try to do silly things like create application folders to store custom BAM spreadsheets, then you'll be fine ;-P

<Edit>

I've just realised that the BamConfiguration.xml file is a settings file for BAM! Doh! Thanks also to Carlo for pointing that mistake out as well :)