In short, YES you should cluster the service if possible. I have seen lots of posts on this and I think that some recent problems with SSO clustering (see my post here for fixes) may have caused people to shy away from it. If you are running SQL on a cluster, then you may as well tack on another clustered service and have that much more protection. If you are not running SQL in a cluster then clustering the Master Secret Server will probably not make much of a difference for you!

I recently resolved this issue for a client but I suspect that many people have it due to some incorrect documentation regarding the installation of a clustered Master Secret Server. The Problem: SSO Master Secret server fails to start after failing over to second cluster node.

Now that notepad is 20+ years old I guess Microsoft decided to beef it up a little. XML Notepad 2007 is the new kid on the block and it is a nice little tool. I will probably keep on using XmlSpy and the BizTalk Editor for schema creation, but I'll give a go at using XML Notepad to create those pesky instance documents for test submissions to my orchestrations.

BizTalk 2006 seems to have a deployment quirk that has been no small source of frustration for me. I don't know if this is widespread or if I just have a bad install but it seems that whenever I change a port (add a port or remove a port) I get an error similar to the following:

I decided to whip up a quick prototype of FailedMessage subscription in BizTalk 2006 and I ended up hitting a couple of bumps in the road on my first shot. I'm the kind that does not stop and ask for directions, nor do I take the time to look at samples. I try to do it on my own, and failing that, I'll hit the blogs. All of that with a couple of trial and error sessions produced the following notes that I will use when trying this again:

When trying to create a web reference to an existing web service you may see one or both of the following messages Unabled to create web reference Failed to create web rererence If you see these messages (or similar messages), open up the source code (if you have it) from the service that you are trying to consume. Examine the attributes of the webmethods. See if there is a “Name” attribute on the methods, and remove it if there is. After you have done this you should be able to create

This will be a semi-fictitious case study. In using MOM 2005 to recover an errant SQL port. This scenario is common and I've been asked about it a lot. This approach is the simple meat and potatoes process. There are lots of areas that could be polished up but that kind of thing can clutter up an article with too much detail.

Uncaught exception (see the 'inner exception' below) has suspended an instance of service ''. The service instance will remain suspended until administratively resumed or terminated. If resumed the instance will continue from its last persisted state and may re-throw the same unexpected exception. InstanceId: Shape name: ShapeId: Exception thrown from: segment -1, progress -1 Inner exception: Multi-part message 'Sql_response' has body part 'BodyPart