Scope Timeouts

I had an instance recently where a scope in an orchestration would timeout pretty much instantly despite having a timeout period of 10 seconds. This was a real head-scratcher and I couldn't see where the issue was.

After discussing with a colleague we stumbled upon a difference in the clock time between the application server (where the orchestration runs) and the biztalk message box server. The time difference was almost 10 seconds leading to the "inst ant" timeout. A quick look in the event log indicated a problem with the NTP service and the domain controller (another story!) causing the system time to drift out. Correcting the clock fixed my timeout problem.

Host Startup Failure

In my experience, the failure to start a host instance is most often caused by an error in the BizTalk config file btsntsvc.exe.config. This can be because it is not well-formed XML or the content is incorrect.
For example recently I had to investigate an issue with automated unit test failures which turned out to be caused by an incorrect config file update. A WCF client endpoint had been added outside of the element. The error I saw in the event log was:

A failure occurred when executing a Windows service request.

Service request: Start

BizTalk host name: BizTalkServerApplication
Windows service name: BTSSvc$BizTalkServerApplication

Additional error information:
Error code: 0xc0c0153a
Error source: BizTalk Server 2009
Error description: A BizTalk subservice has failed while executing a service request.

Subservice: Tracking
Service request: Start

Additional error information:
Error code: 0x80131534
Error source: System.Data
Error description: The type initializer for 'System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection' threw an exception.