Web service times out before the orchestration completes

Today we ran into some problems when making a call to a web service that took more than 90 seconds via the SOAP adapter. After 90 seconds we got a “System.Net.WebException: The operation has timed-out” error in return. It turned out that we had to set the SOAP.ClientConnectionTimeOut context property for the request message. We did this in the message construction using the following code.

<div><span style="color: #000000; ">MyRequestMessage(SOAP.ClientConnectionTimeout) = 200000;</span></div>

I found this post by Thomas Restrepo useful for understanding both the problem and solution. Apparently the default value is 90000 (90 seconds) before the adapter times out. This article on MSDN is also an excellent read when working with web services and BizTalk server.