Unexpected EOF error

If you wanted another example where good error handling in code could save some time, here's one -

Last week I was making some changes to a small process I've had for ages; the process was all working when I wanted to extract a small bit of information from the message and decided to use the XLANG/s xpath method to do so.

I planned to get the actual xpath string from a helper class (I always do, to help with maintenance), so I've create a variable for it, but as a temporary step I've put the xpath as the initialising value for the variable.

When trying to build the project I've received an error in the error list  - "Unexpected EOF".  not very useful.

This could have taken me ages to figure out, but luckily I knew the only thing I changed was adding that variable, so I changed the initialising value to TEST and tried to build; this time the error was much more meaningful -

"identifier 'TEST' does not exist in '<process name>'; are you missing an assembly reference?"

as well as -          

"cannot find symbol 'TEST'

Just out of curiosity I tried again with the value of TEST THREE WORDS, this time it looked like

"identifier 'TEST' does not exist in '<process name>'; are you missing an assembly reference?"

and

"cannot find symbol 'TEST'

as well as

unexpected identifier: 'THREE'

and

expected ';'          

So what do I make out of it -

To start with I should stop forgetting that the values for string variables should be provided in quotes

That having a single quote in a variable value results in the rather cryptic "Unexpected EOF" error

That BizTalk could have done slightly more to validate values of variables at design/compile time and save us developers precious time :-)

Failed to register adapter <...> for receive location

Everyone gets this error in the event log every once in a while -

The Messaging Engine failed to register the adapter for "<...>" for the receive location "<...>".

Please verify that the receive location exists, and that the isolated adapter runs under an account that has access to the BizTalk databases.

Mostly I get this when I publish a new BizTalk web service and forget to selected the correct application pool (using windows service 2003).

Often this comes up when setting up an XP (or Vista) workstations for the first time and forgetting to sort out ASPNET permissions.

Sometimes it is simply a typo in the receive location's url, or a problem the script that was supposed to enable it, all of those are pretty much suggested through the event log entry message.

But earlier this week I had another case, one which never happened to me before (and, arguably, shouldn't have happened at all, but if it did for me, there must be another idiot who would do the same! :-)), and that one is not mentioned in the message -

I have published an orchestration web service, selected the correct application pool and made sure the receive location was enabled but still this error would be logged.

What I didn't do (I blame it on having a cold) is to actually create an instance of the host under which the receive location is configured to run; I had a host configured and selected but no host instance...