Here's an interesting one: I was installing the ESB Toolkit 2.0 on a Win 7 x86 machine the other day, and during install got an error from Visual Studio saying "The operation could not be completed.":

If you choose OK, the ESB Installer finishes with a success message, but then the Itinerary Designer doesn't work in Visual Studio (you get an error about a missing assembly when you try and add a new itinerary to a project).

There was nothing in the event log at all about this.

When I turned on MSI logging, I saw that the devenv.exe process had returned an error, but that the MSI installer was swallowing it, and continuing on.

What's odd is that I've never seen this error during install of the toolkit on Win 2008 R2 which is, in theory, the same kernel.

Note: I'm aware that the ESB Toolkit 2.0 is not officially supported on Windows 7 or 2008 R2, but that's all I have to work with at my client!

The solution is to run the installer from an elevated command prompt i.e. right-click the Command Prompt icon, select Run as Administrator. Then in the elevated command window, navigate to the folder containing your ESB msi file, and type:

msiexec /i "BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0-x86.msi"

I suspect the reason for this is that the installer kicks off an instance of devenv.exe to install the Itinerary Designer templates, and the devenv.exe process needs to be elevated to do this (as it updates the registry). So I suspect this is a fault with the MSI package more than anything.

Unsure if anyone else has come across this – it may also be because the Win 7 image I was using was a bit more locked down as it was on a domain and a lot of restrictive Group Policies applied.