I’ve spent some time playing with the recent BizTalk
Services CTP SDK (way cool stuff!), and ran into a weird error that perhaps others
might run into: Sometimes, but not always, I would get an error when trying to use
any of the BizTalk Services WCF extensions, like the relay channel, during initalization.
For example, if I wanted to start the service part of the Echo sample included with
the SDK, sometimes I’d get the following exception during the host.Open() call:
Microsoft.ServiceModel.Relay.ServerErrorException: The server had an error while
processing request.
at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Relay.RelayListener.InitiateConnection()
at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Relay.RelayListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ChannelFx.RefcountedCommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Relay.RelayChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ChannelFx.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open()
at Microsoft.ServiceModel.Relay.Samples.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Pro
gram Files\BizTalk Services SDK\Samples\EchoSample\Service\Program.cs:line 32
I couldn’t figure out why this was happening at first because I couldn’t always repro
it. What I’d do then is just start closing stuff (thinking perhaps it was some sort
of resource exhaustion) until it started working again. But then I noticed that whenever
this was happening, the Cardspace Card Selector UI, when launched manually through
the Control Panel, would fail to start up as well. I would get the following
error and then the infospace.exe process would hang in memory until I manually killed
it through Task Manager:
Checking the windows Application Log I’d see this:
The Windows CardSpace user interface process failed in its initialization phase.
This might be due to an error during the creation of the private desktop. Exception
of type ‘Microsoft.InfoCards.UIAgentInitializationException’ was thrown.
Not very useful, but it was a place to start. I started looking again to see what
I had running (all sorts of stuff) and trying stuff out until I found the culprit: Console.
I love using Console instead of the regular cmd.exe plain because it is more configurable
and has a tabbed interface. Plus, I have configured default shells for both cmd.exe
and PowerShell that I can launch quickly with a single keystroke.
For some weird reason, though, it appears that the Cardspace Card Selector User Interface
refuses to start on my Windows Server 2003 R2 virtual machine (VPC2007) as long as
Console is running. Close Console, and both Cardspace and the BizTalk Services
SDK samples start working again perfectly.
No idea why this happens, as the Cardspace UI works just fine even though Console
is running on my main Vista machine, but there you go.