Interesting BizTalk Error – When’s a receive location not a receive location?

Today in class (in the beautiful city of Perth 🙂 I was busily going through a class
demo in BTS06 R2(Feb CTP) and I created a Project having:

1. BizTalk project
2. Test App
3. BizTalk Wizard Published WCF Service hosted in IIS.

I then needed to give this out to the 12 students in class, so I (some something quick):

• zipped up the project + Test App
• exported the Bindings info (via a MSI)
• Seeing I had made a few changes in IIS to the virtual directory/web app created I
  decided to use IIS Mgr, select the Virtual Directory, then under ‘Tasks….’ select
  ‘Export to Config file xml’ option

  This essentially saves the metadata (that’s normally placed in the IIS metabase) into
  the file – I envisaged the students would be able to ‘Import XML IIS Config file’
  and be done with it……….

  nice thoughts……

After all was said and done, the error we got was something like “Receive
location /SERVICES/WCFSERVICE/page.svc” could not be found.

All was inplace and worked on my machine…..we did discover what the problem was
and moral to this story…..

“/SERVICES/WCFSERVICE/page.svc” is treated differently to

“/Services/wcfService/page.svc”    (this was the actual BTS receive
location path settings for the ‘basicHttpBinding’.

Solution:

– either change the BTS receive location to capitals….or….recreate the Virtual
directory under IIS…..or……modify the virtual directory config.xml file.

Now we know……