Installing BizTalk 2006 R2 BAM Portal on IIS7

Whilst Windows 2008, nor IIS7 is a supported platform for BizTalk Server 2006 R2, nor the BAM Portal - it is still possible to get working.

I use this setup as my day-to-day development workstation. Code is committed and built on a build machine so I'm not too worried about incompatibilities.

The BAM Portal (with BizTalk 2006 at least) won't run on 64-bit IIS installations, which is annoying as it's likely you'll be running other web-sites and services in 64-bit mode. IIS7 has a great enhancement over IIS6 in that you can run a in a mixed-mode of 64-bit and 32-bit by applying it at the App Pool level.

Alas, this doesn't help in configuring the BAM Portal initially. But with a little devious trickery you can do it.

1. You need to install the legacy Admin Scripts for IIS. This is done through the Roles & Features stuff in Server Manager.
2. You need to set IIS6 to be 32-bit in the same way as you would for IIS7, using the script (whether IIS7 actually uses this or not I don't know):
   cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64 1
3. You can now run the BizTalk Configurator, the above setting is enough to fool it into installing
4. Configure the BAM Portal as normal
5. Remove the 32-bit switch:
   cscript.exe adsutil.vbs delete W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64
6. Find the automatically created "BAMAppPool" Application Pool in IIS and change the Advanced Properties to set it to 32-bit mode.

This should be all you need to do to get it working. Now you have a 64-bit IIS server, with BAM Portal working just fine.