I'm reposting after receiving several emails asking why Windows XP Service Pack 2 prevents the BizTalk Explorer from working correctly!

I installed WinXP SP2 on my main development workstation this weekend after reviewing much of the support documentation and a recent BTS2004 KB article (841893). The install of SP2 went fine and after making the registry changes outlined in the article, the SSO service started again and I went back to work revising my current BTS2004 solution for deployment on Monday morning.

I usually use the BizTalk Explorer to "manage" both my local development instance of BTS2004 as well as my production servers (BTS2004 and SQL2000). Due to the nature of my revisions, I needed to completely undeploy and redeploy my solution on the production servers. Having thoroughly tested the redeployment on my development notebook during the weekend, I was surprised to find that I could not delete any receive ports, send ports or send port groups on my production servers using the BizTalk Explorer on my development notebook (See the error message below). Since I had several inbound and outbound maps and custom pipelines deployed in my solution, the only way to undeploy the assemblies is to first delete the ports and port groups referencing these and without the BizTalk Explorer, I was stuck. I then disabled my receive port and watched the inbound messages pile up.


Figure 1: What an Informative Error Message (Not)

I opened a support case using my MSDN Universal subscription and the support technician, Vipul Goyal [MSFT] emailed me back within 30 minutes! A few minutes later we were on the phone discussing the problem and Vipul offered several suggestions to try. When none of these worked, he pointed me to the WMI scripts in the SDK that would allow me (with a little modification I'll discuss in a future post) to delete my ports and port groups and redeploy my solution. While I was doing this, he contacted the BTS product team, the SP2 QFE team and confirmed the issue. Using the WMI scripts and the BizTalk Deployment Wizard, I was able to redeploy my revised solution and restarted my receive ports. Back up and running in under four hours! Late this afternoon, I received the email from Vipul with the "fix" (which turned out to be a blinding flash of the obvious - exclude MSDTC from the firewall) which works great.


Figure 2: Firewall Exceptions


Figure 3: Adding the MSDTC exception