Enabling tests and tracking in the "Diagnostics" tab for the "Message Queueing" node in Computer Management on Windows

Thanks to a coworker, I finally know how to enable the Diagnostics for MSMQ in Computer Management on Windows so that I can better diagnose and track issues for working with MSMQ.

See this. To find it on Google, search for this: "site:msdn.microsoft.com Enable Route Tracking and Test Messages" and also see this post from the MSMQ Mighty Hero, John Breakwell.

Solving "The signature is invalid." errors on MSMQ messages in the "MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 3)" series by Tom Hollander

My company has recently had need for an MSMQ-backed queueing solution, that happened to match the topology described in Tom Hollander's "MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 3)" blog post. I went a first round with that piece, trying to get it to work on our network. It cost me about a week's worth of time before I had to show that I couldn't get it to work and negotiate a deferral of the last phase of the work: enabling Transactions in addition to the security on the queue. Well, this issue reared its ugly head again and I was forced back to it. This time, I was able to get it to work with much less time and effort.

The error that I kept encountering was all my messages would go straight to the System Transactional Dead Letter Queue, with the error on them "The signature was invalid".

TL;WR: There's several steps that were unique to our setup that weren't mentioned in Tom Hollander's blog post.

The extra steps that I had to implement that weren't in the blog post were (at a high level) as follows:
1) Configure MSDTC to enable XA transactions, mutual authentication, and allowing remote clients.
2) Configure both the MSMQ Server and queues to grant Full Control to the principal that was running the service.
3) Ensure that the principal that was making the request to the server had full control over its respective queues.
4) Install MSMQTriggers and MSDTC in addition to the MSMQ service, because these pieces were apparently necessary for transactions to work in the setup in the Blog post from Tom Hollander. He never explicitly states in the Blog post series that these items have to be installed. They do.

I'll publish a follow up post with steps to automate setup of all of this if I have the time.

Automating setup of keys for Release Annotations in App Insights during an automated Release

Microsoft has finally added this ability, though the documentation is not available at the time of this writing. For instructions on how to do it, see this UserVoice item for the issue :

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/357324-application-insights/suggestions/13607550-enable-creation-and-management-of-api-keys-via-pow?tracking_code=06b602f1fc962c339ed8bcf534fcdb2f#{toggle_previous_statuses}