BizTalk SB-Messaging Receive Adapter Suspends Brokered Messages Without a Body

When it comes to processing zero-byte messages, the built-in receive adapters in BizTalk Server are somewhat inconsistent (see this recent post by Mark Brimble for more information). However, it seems that most receive adapters do not successfully process messages without body content. For example, the File adapter will delete an empty file and kindly put a notification to that effect in the event log. The HTTP adapter will reject a POST request with no content and return a 500 “Internal Server” error. So it probably isn’t any real surprise that the Azure Service Bus Messaging adapter introduced in BizTalk Server 2013 also obstructs bodiless messages. The difference here though is that the message will be successfully received from the queue or topic (and therefore removed from Service Bus), but will immediately be suspended with an error like the following:

A message received by adapter “SB-Messaging” on receive location “SB-ReceivePort_Queue_SB” with URI “sb://<namespace>.servicebus.windows.net/TestQueue” is suspended.
Error details: There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: “Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines.PassThruReceive, Microsoft.BizTalk.DefaultPipelines, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35” Source: “Pipeline ” Receive Port: “SB-ReceivePort” URI: “sb://<namespace>.servicebus.windows.net/TestQueue” Reason: The Messaging Engine encountered an error while reading the message stream.

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