Even though I’m not actively developing in BizTalk these days, I still have a need to go in and do some support on an existing system a couple of times a year. Of course it takes me a little bit to get back into the BizTalk frame of mind. Today, I had to make a couple of changes to an orchestration and deploy. Part of this process involved un-enlisting several receive locations while I made this change.

When I re-enlisted the receive locations and went to check for problems, I noticed that all of my messages where not being processed due to there be no subscription setup for them. I knew that my orchestration should be subscribed to these messages, and thankfully BizTalk creates a suspended message instance that lists the context of the message at the time of the routing failure. I immediately noticed that none of my promoted properties were in the context, which would explain the routing issue.

It took me a while to figure out how to fix this, but in the end I noticed that the receive pipeline on my receive locations looked incorrect. Checking a staging server, documentation, and an XML copy of the bindings I exported before the change, I confirmed my suspicion. It seems that during the the deployment process and the un-enlist and re-enlist, some of my receive locations reverted to the default pass thru receive pipeline. After changing them back the XML receive pipeline, things are all good.