Adam Singer : Tips and Tricks

Hyperordinary

Adam Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:27:00 GMT

Apparently, if there's one thing that can get me blogging up a storm it's Hyper-V. I just can't get enough! The word of the day is "snapshots". Learn it, love it, and dance with joy.

I currently have two different main machines I've been prodding over the last two days. One is my development machine that I previously mentioned, and the other is a test machine where I'm testing install on workgroup, a domain, with different settings, etc. and storing states that I want to poke at more later - all by using snapshots. Without them, this work would have taken at least twice as long, either because Virtual Server's undo disks suffered performance-wise or I would be reimaging machines to much cleaner states than need be.

How can it get any better, you ask? Why, how about with a simple scriptably WMI interface that already has a great library of tools in a Codeplex project! Powershell plus Hyper-V makes the virtual world go 'round. If you do any manual Hyper-V management, check it out.

Virtual Machine has gained a level

Adam Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:01:00 GMT

I just wrote this up for a coworker who asked me how to move a virtual machine from being hosted by Virtual Server to Hyper-V. First off, I'd like to say that I am a big fan of this type of upgrade. The first step to improving your virtualization experience is realizing that your experience could be improved, after all :)

In any case, it should be a fairly trivial move and would function on Virtual PC 2004/2007 machines, as well. The only thing you'll need is the vhd(s) of your current virtual machine.

Uninstall the VM Additions from the VPC prior to uninstalling Virtual Server
Copy the vhd file to your Hyper-V machine
Create a new VM using the VHD and start it
Once it starts up, open the Hyper-V view of the machine from the Hyper-V role in Server Manager
Select the Action menu, Insert Integration Services Disk, and proceed with the installation.

That should basically be it all you need -- everything else should just work. Note that you won’t be able to use external networking with a normal Hyper-V network adaptor until you have the Integration Services installed. If you need network before that you’ll have to shut the virtual machine off and add a Legacy Network Adaptor. For example, you would need this if you have Win2003 prior to SP1 since the Integration Services require SP2.

Enjoy, and happy virtualizing!

Hyper-V: They've gone plaid!

Adam Singer — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:02:00 GMT

The title is a reference to "Spaceballs", of course.

Recently, I've been doing all of my development on a machine that doesn't exist. This both amuses me greatly and increases my productivity.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm using a Hyper-V guest OS as a development machine with the host running Windows Server 2008 x64. The machine has two harddrives, one of which has two partitions (OS and programs on one, vhd files and other persistent data on the other), and the other of which is actually offline from the perspective of the host OS.

Instead, my development guest machine has complete control of this second drive and uses it as my version control enlistment store. That means that every time I roll back to my earlier snapshot of that machine to install the latest pre-release development tools and reattach the drive its contents match what TFS says it should have and I don't need to run a complete force get.

The host has 2 processors so I've set my development guest to have two as well (otherwise building would be slower). I haven't noticed any performance degradation in terms of TFS operations, build time, etc. on the dev box and have seen significant improvements in the time it takes me to get up to the latest dogfood bits (yum yum). In addition, while the dev box is getting prepared I can still be checking e-mail, the Visual Studio Team System forums, or other similar work on my host OS.

I've been running this configuration since a little before the Hyper-V RC was released and am very content. I've also spent a good deal of time testing TFS configurations on Hyper-V and am very pleased with the snapshotting functionality in particular. If you haven't installed the RTM version, do it now!

My service is packed, I'm ready to go

Adam Singer — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:12:00 GMT

...installing here, upgrade once more
(Adapted from "Leaving on a Jet Plane")

A post on the Visual Studio Team System forums reminded me of one very important tidbit of Visual Studio patching. The integration of Team Foundation Server with Visual Studio enables all sorts of marvelous functionality and is great for development, but does place some restrictions on what patching scenarios are supported.

In particular, all Visual Studio derived products on the same machine must have the same service pack level. This includes Visual Studio Express SKUs, Visual Studio Standard, Professional, Team System (and the individual role SKUs), Team Foundation Server's Application Tier, Data Tier (only exists in TFS 2005), Team Build, Proxy, and Team Explorer. Since these components share common assemblies, if one tool has been upgraded to SP1 while another is still at RTM the functionality is undefined and unsupported.

The easiest way to check your SP level is look in the control panel Add/Remove Programs (on XP/Server 2003) or Programs and Features (on Vista/Sever 2008). For the former, check the "Show updates" button. On the latter, click the "View installed updates" link. There, you should be able to see which components have been updated and which haven't. If there's a mismatch, my recommendation is to reapply the Visual Studio and TFS service packs to bring everything back up to the latest SP. Of course, you can also uninstall the SP from everywhere that it's installed, but I would hope you'd want to get the latest and greatest functionality!

Best of luck, folks, and feel free to shoot along questions and comments if there's any other topics you want to see me address.

License to Nil

Adam Singer — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 07:54:00 GMT

As a follow up to my explication on the various TFS Editions and a few thread I saw on the Visual Studio Team System forums (including Upgrading TFS 2008 Workgroup to Std. Edition - then TF50626), I'd like to point out something about the upgrade from Workgroup Edition to Full Edition.

When you're running Workgroup Edition, users need to be added to the Team Foundation Licensed Users group in order to connect to the server. However, the Full Edition doesn't have this restriction and in fact doesn't use the Licensed Users group to limit server access. What confused folks it that the upgrade doesn't remove the group. In fact, due to the way our group membership logic was coded the group still has a maximum membership of 5 users!

The best way to make sure that your upgrade succeeded is to actually remove a user from the Licensed Users group, add that user to a different TFS security group, and make sure the user can still connect to the server. If that works, you should be able to just ignore the Licensed Users group.

I'll follow up with my team to see if we can get this group removed on upgrade to help avoid confusion in the future.

Absence makes the install grow fonder

Adam Singer — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:15:00 GMT

As I mentioned in a previous post, our program manager Sudhir is blogging up a storm on all the great new features in Orcas, including remote Analysis Services and Sharepoint. You can also use pre-installed and configured Sharepoint instances, if your company already has one set up. Brian Harry recently posted the final TFS 2008 feature list, and I'm very pleased to say that you can also use a remote Reporting Services instance in the final version! Note that this was not available in time for Beta2, unfortunately. We still need to have some SQL assemblies on the application tier during setup so we can use the API, but that can be acheived by just installing the workstation components.

Having played around with remote capabilities a bit, I must say that I'm really pleased with the update. I've seen many requests for it on the forums and so believe you'll be pleased with it as well. In any case, I wanted to let you know a bit about how to set up our install to use a remote SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It's very similar to our Analysis Services Flexibility. You'll have to copy the installation folder onto a local disk from the media where you can edit the msiproperty.ini file.

Open the MSIProperty.ini file located under InstallMedia\AT directory
Change VSTF_RS_SERVER property to indicate the machine that the Reporting Services resides on.
If you Report Manager virtual direrctory is located at a different path than the default http://[reportserver]/Reports, set the VSTF_RS_REPORTS_URI to point to the correct location.
If your Report Server virtual directory is located at a path than the default http://[reportserver]/ReportServer, set the VSTF_RS_REPORTSERVER_URI to point to the correct location.

Note that you may have to open some firewall ports on the remote SSRS machine for our installation to complete successfully.

Happy installing, and please do let me know what your experiences are with remote components, good, bad, or ugly!

Great news!

Adam Singer — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:45:00 GMT

I'm still alive! Yes, I know you all agree that's great news. At least, I think it's great news so will classify it as such here in my blog.

First, a bit of business:

Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System product team – This Wednesday

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new in Beta 2.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1^st, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

-or-

Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1^st, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Now for something on a more specific and on-the-front-lines style.

Orcas Beta 2 has been out for awhile now, and with it a lovely improvement that I think will make Team Foundation administrators jump for joy, throwing confetti and streamers all the way. Hey, it's still my blog and I can imagine what I want to.

In Whidbey, syncing users from Active Directory to TFS happened due to three conditions but really only two conditions. This was fixed in Orcas as part of the Sync Large Groups feature crew. As such, you can now take advantage of the ability to modify the periodic AD/GSS sync period. To do so, you need to manually modify a Web.config file on the Application Tier that by deafult will appear under the folder "%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\services". DISCLAIMER: I do not guarrantee that this will not cause your computer to eat all of the data it has ever come into contact with, possible with fire. This confers no warranties and no rights, your mileage may vary, use at your own risk, void where prohibited, etc. [Note: still my blog].

You'll need to add the following two lines to the key/value pair section at the top of this file, followed by resetting IIS to make sure our application pool picks up the changes:

<add key="IdentityUpdatePeriod" value="01:00:00" />
<add key="IdentityUpdateInitial" value="01:00:00" />

Note that I've set both the initial update (i.e. the delay after startup that the first periodic sync happens) and the delay between periodic syncs to 1 hour. You can increase this to multiple hours, or decrease it to a matter of minutes. Be very careful when reducing the time as forcing the sync to happen too frequently will likely decrease the overall performance/throughput of your Team Foundation Server due to the multiple connections to your domain controllers that a sync opens as well as the processing that it kicks off in the SQL Server to update the cache.

Well, there you have it. Administrators spontaneously breaking out in song, bluebirds and rainbows for everyone, and a bright smiling sun grinning at us from behind fluffy white clouds. That last part sounds somehow like Super Mario Brothers, and this frightens me.

Can you direct me to Directory Services?

Adam Singer — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:15:00 GMT

As with many of my other Administration and Operations posts, this one stems from posts I've seen on the Visual Studio Team System forums. I've read a number of questions where people are having trouble granting their Active Directory users access to their Team Foundation Server.

What I've found is that, oftentimes, this is due to either the trust relationships between their domains or the permissions for the account currently running as the TFS service account. In the latter case, this may be due to using a local account rather than AD account as the service account, AD permission settings, the "Log on as service" permission, or AD trust relationships (looping us back to the first possibility).

So, to help you figure this all out, I'm going to lay down The Word on what it is you need to set up in order to get AD users into TFS.

If you wish to use AD users, you must either:

Create local accounts with the same user names and passwords as your AD accounts (and add them to a TFS group) if you want to use a local account as your TFS service account (or)
Use an AD account for your TFS service account

In the second case, your TFS service account needs to have read access to objects in all domains you wish to add users from

In short, this means the domain of the TFS service account must be trusted by all of the other domains you wish to use
Also, users in those domains need to be granted the rights to read objects. This is the default, but some folks lock down their ADs so normal users can't read all other users/computers/etc. for their domain. If your domains are set up this way, you'll have to talk the domain admins into granting the permission to your service account explicitly.

No matter what your TFS service account is, it needs "Log on as a Service" permission. Two useful sites on how to set this permission are this forum post and our MSDN documentation.

Hopefully setting that up will let you add your domain users to TFS. If not, though, there may be fouler forces at work. Still, you'll probably want to take a look back at my other post on getting users into TFS entitled "Get your users for nothin' and your sync for free" as our periodic sync process is known to have issues in Whidbey (VSTS 2005) RTM and SP1.

Best of luck, and let me know if you hit any other stumbling blocks along the way!

[Edit: I should note that, from what I can recall of our stated support cases, we permit you to have as many two-way trusts as you like, but only claim to support one one-way trust where the TFS service account must be in the trusted domain.]

Must be Monday

Adam Singer — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:56:00 GMT

Steps to have an interesting Monday morning:

Arrive at work to find that your coworker's door has been locked from the inside
Realize that nobody in the office has keys
Push up the ceiling tiles in an attempt to drop a book over the door through the ceiling to knock the door handle
Realize that the gap left by the ceiling tile inside the office is too small for the Inside SQL Server 2000 book you planned to drop in
Find extra cables (you're a tech company, of course you have power cords, PS2 cables, etc. lying around)
Chain them together, with the power cable at the end tied into a noose (why do you know how to tie nooses? Two words: rock climbing)
Spot through one of the windows along the tops of the office walls while the coworker lowers and swings the noose contraption around
Proclaim "now!" at random intervals, sometimes when the noose is actually around the door handle
Watch as the noose slides off the handle again and again, though eventually it will catch fast
Witness the door handle turn slowly- so slowly- until the door pops open

So where have I been? Let's just pretend I've been locked in his office this whole time. More posts on administrative functions of Team Foundation Server coming, starting later this week!

On sheep and goldfish

Adam Singer — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:16:00 GMT

Here's an old story readjusted for the modern world:

A project manager, a developer, and a tester are riding on a train in Scotland. Along the way, they pass a black sheep. The project manager says, "Hey look! The sheep in Scotland are black." The developer scoffs and says, "There is at least one black sheep in Scotland." The tester shakes his head and says, "To the best of my perception, there is at least one sheep in Scotland which is black on the side facing us."

That being said, as a tester, I try to make as few assumptions about what I'm seeing as possible. The trick is to look at every aspect of the product as though I'd never seen it before. This is rather difficult since I've been working on testing Visual Studio's Team Foundation for about a year and a half now. It's pretty amazing how hard it is to pretend to have the memory of a goldfish.

Be that as it may, I devised a clever ruse to force myself out of a routine. I'm right-handed, so use the mouse with my right hand. Today, I switched the mouse over to the left. This helped break my normal patterns enough that I could "learn" the product again.

Note- not recommended for people easily frustrated.

Acme Code Corp.

Adam Singer — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 15:56:00 GMT

One of the major missing features in the 1.0 and 1.1 .NET Framework was generics (similar to "templates" in C++, though with important differences). The other day, Jim and I were discussing how to best approach the new set of Visual Studio Team Foundation Version Control automated UI tests and what sort of class heirarchy we want. Our decision was that we want a few helper classes which can be instantiated as needed to drive the multitude of dialogs we test. All of these helpers should have a few elements in common so that we know what we can expect from them.

In particular, we wanted a "Submit" method (performs the default action on the dialog), a "Cancel" method that takes the way to cancel (click cancel, click the close box, alt-F4, or the escape key), a "Help" method that takes its access method (F1, menu bar button), and a property that exposes the underlying dialog object, if active. This is starting to sound like an interface, yes? Well, the one problem was that each dialog has its own class, and some are dialogs, some are toolwindows, and some are actually just parts of other windows. Since we want to return a fully-typed reference from the property to avoid casting issues later on, this started to look a little hairy.

The simple solution was "generics". Here's the relevant code:

interface IBase_DialogHelper<T> { T InnerDialog { get; } ... }

Then, in our actual helper code:

class Checkout_DialogHelper : IBase_DialogHelper<TeamFoundationCheckOutDialog> { public TeamFoundationCheckOutDialog InnerDialog { get { ... } } ... }

Pretty darn simple, if you ask me, and a much needed addition. And this way, no one will ever try to cast the test code TeamFoundationCheckOutDialog class to a TeamFoundationResolveWizard, thus bringing on the end times and ending the age of wonders.

Microsoft Palabra

Adam Singer — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:28:00 GMT

Did you know that Microsoft Word 2003 has translation built in? Type in a sentence and highlight it. Then, go to "Tools" -> "Language" -> "Translate..." Select the "to" language, and watch for your translation.

I tried translating "This is a test sentence which we want Microsoft Word to translate" into Spanish and got "Ésta es una frase de prueba que quisiéramos que Microsoft Word tradujera." (Roughly: "This is a sentence of test that we would like for Microsoft Word to translate.") Not bad at all.

It's got French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (both PRC and Taiwan), Dutch Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese. Moreover, it looks like you can translate from any one to any other.

Now, all they have to do is add a "read this sentence to me out loud" and we've got ourselves a learn-a-new-language-at-home program!