“parameter is incorrect” error during orchestration enlistment

I had an interesting problem yesterday, and Google wasn’t able to find anything to help me, so I thought I’d do a post it here for the benefit of others that may experience the same thing.

I had a project that built and compiled fine, but when I went to enlist the orchestration, I got a “parameter is incorrect” error. Not much to go on! (this was with BizTalk 2004, BizTalk 2006 may work differently)

I found some references that implied this could be caused by a missing dependency, but that didn’t seem to fit here as I had quintuple-checked all dependencies.

After some digging, it turns out that what was failing was that there was a namespace issue with a promoted property. I was using that promoted property as part of a filter condition in a dynamically bound activating receive port. When the enlistment process ran, it was unable to create the subscription, resulting in this error.

It all makes perfect sense (now!)