WCF-SQL Transport Component is not registered correctly

You may have come across the message "WCF-SQL Transport Component is not registered correctly" when setting up a receive location or send port in BizTalk.  Some blogs suggest re-installing the BizTalk Adapater Pack.

However, in the scenario that the company I work for, this isn't the case.

The architecture of the environment was designed to be a multi-server environment with 6 BizTalk server front-ends.  Three of the servers were built to be used as Orchestration servers, and the other three were built as Receive and Send servers.

At a high-level, this sounds acceptable (pending you are configuring these at the host level - more on that later).  

However, the 6 servers aren't built alike.  The adapter packs (among other things as well) were only installed on the Receive/Send servers.  One main reason this was done were that some third-party adapters had a per-server licensing fee (i.e. special ftp adapter), and the company wanted to keep costs down while still being compliant.  ("We aren't going to use them on the Orchestration servers, so why install them on ALL servers?").  

Unfortunately, the policy above bleeded over to other adapters as well, regardless if a licensing issue was at hand or not.  In this case, the WCF Adapter Pack was not installed across all 6 servers.  

When you open up the BizTalk Administration Console (regardless from which server you remoted to), you do see the WCF adapters which were installed.

Back to the issue at hand.  If you happen to create a send or receive port onto a server that does NOT have the adapters installed on, you will get the error.  You may think that the BT Admin Console is a database-driven configuration, and you would be correct with that assumption.  However, if you click on the OK button, BizTalk tries to verify, at a minimum, the configuration settings with the locally-installed artifacts that are needed for that type of transport.

Resolving the issue was to log onto the Receieve/Send Port servers and create the ports from those servers, rather then the Orchestration servers.  No need to install/uninstall anything.

Two takeaways from this:  

1. It may be in your best interest to keep all servers as similar as possible and let the host instances dictate which servers run what BizTalk hosts.
2. Even though the settings within the BizTalk Administration Console are stored in the BizTalk databases, it does indeed verify a few things to the local server.  Make sure you are logged onto the proper server.