Deploying a custom BizTalk Adapter in a merge module (and registry trouble)

I've been struggling the last two days to deploy a custom BizTalk adapter using a merge module. My idea was to deploy the binaries and add the necessary registry keys using standard installer technology and then run a custom script to register the adapter in BizTalk using WMI. It didn't work in one go.

 

If you create a adapter project using the adapter wizard, a registry file gets created as well that you need to merge into the registry to get the stuff working. These keys are all in the space HKCR\CLSID\<yourkey>. As you can read in this Registry Architecture article from the Windows IT Library the HKCR is in real life a merged key consisting of the HKLM\Software\Classes and the HKCU\Software\Classes keys. So computer settings and user settings in one place. What happens if you create a key there? I don't really know, but it turns out that in most cases exactly what you want (the adapter works) but in some case not. In my case it didn't.

 

When I ran my setup the installation succeeded but the WMI script failed. When I monitored using RegMon from www.sysintenals.com, it turned out that the WMI Service (wmiprvse.exe) tried to read the HKCU\CLSID\<mykey> value and it couldn't. 

 

Since I think an adapter is a computer owned object, I decided that the keys needed to be computer settings, so instead of adding them to HKCR\CLSID, I added them to HKLM\Software\Classes\CLSID and now the WMI script does succesfully register.

 

For the interested few, here's the WMI script that registers an adapter in BizTalk using C# (this script requires you to reference System.Management both as a DLL and as a using statement):

 

    PutOptions options = new PutOptions();
    options.Type = PutType.CreateOnly;