Solving a Map Reference to a Deleted Schema

Recently a client got into a bit of “hot water” in their BizTalk integration environment because changes to a Common BizTalk application were not deployed prior to one of the dependent applications. This resulted in an error whenever trying to manage the environment’s applications via the BizTalk Admin Console (even when we followed the hint to refresh the console view):

Schema referenced by Map ‘Test.DependentApp.DependentSchema_to_CommonSchema’ has been deleted. The local, cached version of the BizTalk Server group configuration is out of date. You must refresh the BizTalk Server group configuration before making further changes.
(Microsoft.BizTalk.Administration.SnapIn)

The issue was that a new schema contained in the updated Common project was missing. Easy enough to understand, and the steps to resolve it would appear to be simple enough:

1. Undeploy the dependent application
2. Redeploy the Common application (using the new version)
3. Redeploy the dependent application

However, the error above thwarted us at the very first step: we could not delete the dependent application either through the Admin Console or via BTSTask! Read more of this post