Robert Bernstein's Blog

Administering Team Foundation Service (on the web, not on-premise)

Robert Bernstein — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:53:00 GMT

If you are using Team Foundation Service (i.e. in the cloud, not our on-premise Team Foundation Server), finding the administration pages from the web site can be a bit tricky if you don't know where to look.

Log into your TFS account. If you don't have one, you can sign up at http://tfs.visualstudio.com. In the upper-right corner of the page is a gear icon:

Once you click this icon, you will be able to create new projects, manage security, etc.

Thanks to Frank La Vigne for inspiring this post.

Rob

Measuring How Long Commands Take in Windows

Robert Bernstein — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:33:00 GMT

I was considering installing the timeit.exe command on my new laptop, but read that it may not work on the latest versions of Windows. So, I found an article on StackOverflow that recommended using the Measure-Command command in PowerShell. You use it as follows:

PS C:\> Measure-Command { Get-ChildItem }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 28
Ticks             : 288474
TotalDays         : 3.33881944444444E-07
TotalHours        : 8.01316666666667E-06
TotalMinutes      : 0.00048079
TotalSeconds      : 0.0288474
TotalMilliseconds : 28.8474

If you just want to see one of these results, you can specify the field, such as milliseconds, as follows:

PS C:\> (Measure-Command { Get-EventLog "windows powershell" }).Milliseconds

305

Note that Measure-Command does not show you the output of the command that you have executed for PowerShell commands, just the time it took to execute the command. If you want to see the command's output, pipe it to Out-Default, as follows:

PS C:\> Measure-Command { Get-EventLog "windows powershell" | Out-Default }

If you want to use it to execute cmd.exe commands vs. PowerShell commands, use it as follows:

PS C:\> Measure-Command { cmd /c dir /s c:\windows > nul }

Thanks to Casey K and TechGibbon for the useful information.

Rob

Consolidating Hyper-V Differencing Disks into One

Robert Bernstein — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:20:25 GMT

I deleted two snapshots from a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) this morning. This left the base .vhd file and two .avhd differencing disks. I decided I wanted to merge them into a single file and learned that the diskpart tool will let you do this.

Open an elevated command prompt (i.e. run as administrator).
Run diskpart.
Enter: select vdisk "<full path to the latest differencing disk>"

A differencing disk ends in either .avhd or .avhdx.

Enter: merge vdisk depth=n

n will be the number of parent files you want to merge. Since I had two parents, one .vhd and one .avhd for this .avhd file, I used depth=2.

Happy merging!

Rob

Deploying Files for VS2012 Unit Tests

Robert Bernstein — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:09:00 GMT

Are you wondering how to best deploy files for your Visual Studio 2012 Unit Tests because the technique changed from the way you did so in Visual Studio 2010? Check out this MSDN article for all the details:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182475(v=vs.110).aspx

Rob

Query Your BitLocker ID and Password

Robert Bernstein — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 01:04:51 GMT

I could not boot my laptop today because I was prompted for my BitLocker Recovery Key and did not have the associated .txt or .bek files. So, fortunately, I was able to call our helpdesk and have them provide me with the password. I could then boot my system, Whew!

Once I was back in Windows, I wanted to display the BitLocker ID and password for my boot drive. To do so, I launched an elevated command prompt and issued the following command:

manage-bde -protectors -get c:

This then displayed "All Key Protectors", including the ID (which is just a GUID) and the password necessary to unlock the drive in the future. Note that the password is the same value that the helpdesk gave me.

I am posting this to remind myself of how to get this information in the future. I hope it helps someone else, too.

Rob

Text Encoding Options for NLog

Robert Bernstein — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:58:00 GMT

I've been using NLog for a while now and recently decided I wanted to have some of my log files written as Unicode text. I learned that you can specify this in your <target> sections of NLog.config as follows:

Note that I only tested two different encodings, "Unicode" and "UTF-8". Also, "UTF-8" must have the hyphen in it to work.

Migrating a Storage Pool from Windows Server 8 Beta to Windows Server 2012 RTM

Robert Bernstein — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:32:00 GMT

I had a computer running Windows Server 8 Beta with a Storage Pool using the “Parity” resiliency type. I installed Windows Server 2012 RTM “over it” (i.e. not an upgrade) and completely lost access to this Storage Pool when the RTM install completed. So, using a number of MSDN resources and PowerShell commands, I got the Storage Pool back using the following steps:

Reinstalled Windows Server 8 Beta (Build 8250).
Opened PowerShell as Administrator (i.e. elevated).
Executed the following command:

Get-StoragePool

This showed that I had two Storage Pools available.

FriendlyName            OperationalStatus       HealthStatus            IsPrimordial            IsReadOnly
------------            -----------------       ------------            ------------            ----------
RAID                    OK                      Healthy                 False                   True
Primordial              OK                      Healthy                 True                    False

The one named “RAID” is the one that I wanted to mount.
I found instructions suggesting that I make it read/write, so I executed the following command:

Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName RAID -IsReadOnly $false

Executing Get-StoragePool again displayed the following:

FriendlyName            OperationalStatus       HealthStatus            IsPrimordial            IsReadOnly
------------            -----------------       ------------            ------------            ----------
RAID                    OK                      Healthy                 False                   False
Primordial              OK                      Healthy                 True                    False

Storage Pools are mounted as Virtual Disks and need to be referenced by a Virtual Disk Friendly Name, not a Storage Pool Friendly Name. To determine which Virtual Disks were available for mounting and their Friendly Names, I issued the following command:

Get-VirtualDisk

This showed the Virtual Disk’s name to be “RAID5”:

FriendlyName        ResiliencySettingName OperationalStatus   HealthStatus        IsManualAttach      Size
------------        -------------------   -----------------   ------------        --------------      ----
RAID5               Parity                Detached            Unknown             True              1.2 TB

Then I issued the following command to mount the Virtual Disk:

Connect-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName RAID5

At this point, the disk appeared in “Disk Management” (diskmgmt.msc), but it was offline.
I right-clicked on the area labeled “Disk 6, Basic, … , Offline” and selected “Online”. Then the drive was mounted to the first available drive letter:

Then I went into the D: drive, copied all of the files to another partition, and reinstalled Windows Server 2012 RTM where I could create a new, RTM-compatible Storage Space and copy the data back to it.

Rob

Combining Files in PowerShell

Robert Bernstein — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:49:36 GMT

If you need to combine text files in cmd.exe, you would issue the following command:

copy file1.txt+file2.txt+file3.txt combined_files.txt

If you wish to do the same for binary files, you would use the following command:

copy /b file1.bin+file2.bin+file3.bin combined_files.bin

To do the same in PowerShell is pretty straightforward. If the destination file does not already exist or already contains content, you’ll want to issue the New-Item command first. If you know it doesn’t exist or is empty, you can skip that line, below.

New-Item -ItemType file ".\combined_files.txt" –force

Get-Content .\file?.txt | Add-Content .\combined_files.txt

Thanks to Gerardo Lopez for his “Combine or Join Two Text Files Using PowerShell” article, which is the basis for this information.

Rob

Solved: The working folder is already in use by the workspace

Robert Bernstein — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 02:38:00 GMT

When trying to map a local folder to a TFS server as a different user than the one under which I was logged in, I kept getting the message:

The working folder [source path] is already in use by the workspace [workspace name];[owner] on computer [tfs server].

I was finally able to map the folder by first deleting the local workspace as the logged in user:

tf workspace /delete /server:[tfs server] [workspace name];[owner]

Note that the "owner" was the currently logged-in user.

Thanks to the "Geek-A-Boo" blog for the solution at this page.

Rob

TFS Quick Tip: Cloaking

Robert Bernstein — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:11:47 GMT

In the Source Control Explorer in VS2010 or VS2012, you can cloak any folder in the source tree that want to recursively excluded from "Get Latest Version" operations. Just right-click on the folder, select "Advanced" and "Cloak...". VS2010/2012 will even delete all the local files and folders for those that are checked in; this means you will have to manually delete obj and bin directories, etc.

I have found that this saves me a lot of time when pulling from TFS.

Rob