Question

What is the cleanest way to unbind an orchestration using PowerShell?

I’d like to have something that works on both 32bit and 64bit platform.

I know I can load and use the Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM assembly (forcing 32bit mode with something like “Start-Job -RunAs32”) and do something similar to what is explained here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd792703(v=bts.10).aspx

But I’d like to find something better.

Answer 1

I see the sample script you linked is loading this DLL from the GAC:

[System.reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM")

I’m not familiar with this assembly but if it’s pre-compiled to x86 in the GAC then you’ll need to load it with 32bit PowerShell (when on a 64bit Windows system). In your script you can do a check to see what PowerShell process bitness is:

if ( [IntPtr]::Size -eq 4 ) { # x86 } else { # x64  }

If your script is not running in the right bitness there’s three things I can think of:

1. Start a 32 bit background job as you noted

2. Re-launch your script using 32 bit PowerShell (doesn’t work well if your script has params):

   if (-not $correctBitness) { 
       Start-Process "C:\WINDOWS\syswow64\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -ArgumentList "-file", $Invocation.MyCommand.Path
       exit 
   } 
   

3. Tell the user they need to re-launch the script using the 32 bit PowerShell and exit.