HL7: party not resolving custom namespace in BizTalk 2013

I have been busy with this the last couple of hours and really didn’t get it. We recently started a migration to BizTalk 2013 and I was just testing the development machine and came across the problem that my custom namespace was not being resolved in HL7.

Problem

I created a party ROB, which used a custom ADT^A04 schema with namespace http://roborop/HealthCare/HL7/2X. I changed the namespace accordingly in the BTAHL7 Configuration Explorer. After sending messages with ROB as sending application (MSH3_1) it kept resolving to the standard Microsoft namespace: http://microsoft.com/HealthCare/HL7/2X. I tried everything for hours, collegues looked at it and we couldn’t get quite what was wrong here.  I then turned to the internet and found the solution somewhere among the comments of a forum post.

Solution

Install BizTalk 2013’s culumative update packages, located here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2555976/en. After installing both packages everything should work fine. The installation only screwed up my host instance (marked it for deletion), but after recreating that was ok as well.

The only thing I can think of how Microsoft could have screwed this up. Why doesn’t this work from day 1? This is basic functionality for the HL7 accelerator. Anyway, it works now 🙂 In the end I should have checked for cumulative updates anyway.