Exchange Toolbox Unhandled Exception – Deserialization fails

UPDATE 15/03/2023: After Installation of MS Exchange SU March 2023 the issue is resolved!

Download Links March 2023 SU Exchange

Exchange Server 2013 CU23 (note that support and availability of SUs end on April 11, 2023)

Exchange Server 2016 CU23

Exchange Server 2019 CU11 and CU12 

Some people may recognize an error when entering the good old Exchange Toolbox they receive a big red error after some time of waiting. Not that unusual if there is a issue with the Exchange Transport Service. But this time it’s by design if you activated “Certificate signing of PowerShell serialization payload in Exchange Server”.
If you did the console is broken like this.

Microsoft officially presents two solutions for this problem. See the link to the support article.

First thing is to use PowerShell to see the queue. (nice workaround)

Get-Queue  | ft identity,deliverytype,status,velocity,*rate 

Second solution is to disable Certificate Signing of PowerShell Serialization Payload feature with the following command:

Get-SettingOverride -Identity "EnableSigningVerification" | Remove-SettingOverride 

Get-ExchangeDiagnosticInfo -Process Microsoft.Exchange.Directory.TopologyService -Component VariantConfiguration -Argument Refresh 

Restart-Service -Name W3SVC, WAS -Force

Note: Restart these services on only the Exchange Server-based server on which the settings override cmdlet is run.

No further comment to this “workarounds”, but as you can see, the way into the cloud is the only way to escape this small annoyances.

Happy powershelling or disabling 😉