Specified RunAs Account is Invalid

Windows Service Bus Configuration requires a "RunAs" service account which seems like it should be a fairly simple requirement. Unfortunately, if the configuration does not like the user you've entered it displays the generic error message, "Specified RunAs account is invalid." without providing any indication of the problem.

In my case, the service account was fine. The problem was that I logged in with a local administrator account and was trying to use a domain service account, which is not supported. Once I figured out the issue and logged in with a domain account the error went away.

Below are the supported combinations:

Environment	Logged In Account	RunAs Account	Support
Domain	Domain	Domain	Supported
Domain	Domain	Local	Not supported.
Domain	Local	Domain	Not supported.
Domain	Local	Local	Either in development environment (1-box) or by using SQL Authentication.
Workgroup	Domain	Domain	Not supported.
Workgroup	Domain	Local	Not supported. Not possible.
Workgroup	Local	Domain	Not supported. Not possible.
Workgroup	Local	Local	Either in development environment (1-box) or by using SQL Authentication.

Hopefully this article will save someone else the headache of wondering why their service account is considered "invalid".

Building E-commerce Sites with MVC

For those of us who have spent most of our careers building business applications, the prospect of creating an e-commerce storefront can be quite daunting. Not only do you have to deal with calculating tax, estimating shipping and accepting payments, but employees need a way to manage products, discounts and marketing content. Thankfully, there's an open source e-commerce solution written in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC named nopCommerce that provides all this functionality and much more.

I was so impressed by both the functionality and the underlying architecture that I've created a presentation which I believe will serve as a great introduction to MVC as well as a tutorial on developing custom storefronts using nopCommerce.

We start off with a brief overview of basic MVC concepts accompanied by examples within the nopCommerce code. This includes strongly typed Razor views, HTML helpers, jQuery ajax calls, and fluent validation.

Once everyone understands how the website works, we dive into the infrastructure by introducing WCF services, using a generic repository with Entity Framework (EF4) and LINQ, as well as Dependency Injection (DI) with Automapper.

If you'd like to schedule this talk for your local user group, either request me through INETA or contact me directly.

UPDATE 7/13/2013
Thanks to the CodeStock crew and everyone who packed the room for my talk. Y'all had some excellent questions and I invite anyone with additional questions to comment below or contact me directly. Also, don't forget to provide feedback so I can improve the talk for next time.

Click here to view the presentation slides.