Error during configuration of the ESB toolkit 2.0

I recently helped a client debug an exception they were getting when they tried to run the ESB configuration tool. They kept receiving a rather puzzle error messages which stated:

“The type initializer for ‘EsbConfigurationTool.Helper’ threw an exception. You must have Microsoft ESB Guidance installed in order to run the tool.”

Now this is certainly an odd error message since the ESB Toolkit no longer goes by the name ESB Guidance. Also the client most certainly had the toolkit installed. To dig a little deeper into this, I asked for the log file from that the configuration tool creates. This is created in the same directory as the configuration tool and is called “EsbConfigurationTool.log”. After looking in this, I saw a number of error messages which resembled the following:

ESBConfigurationTool.exe Error: 0 : An error has occurred:

Unknown error (0x80005000)

Stack Trace:

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.RefreshCache()

   at EsbConfigurationTool.Helper.GetWebSites()

ESBConfigurationTool.exe Error: 0 : An error has occurred:

IIS Install Registry Key is missing.

I could see from this that the issue was actually with IIS and not with a missing copy of the ESB guidance. From this we were able to determine that the IIS 6.0 extensions were not installed on the Windows 2008 system. Once the client installed those, the configuration ran properly. This is certainly an error message that needs updating, hopefully you won’t be caught by it.

Cheers