Posts from the province

WCF Training in Zürich

If you want to get up to speed on WCF it has come to my attention through my friend Willy-Peter that Juval Löwy will hold one of his WCF Master Classes in Zürich the end of June. As I have understood from friends and colleagues that have attended previous trainings with Juval they come highly recommended. Read all about the details on Willy-Peters blog.

Creating a sandbox environment in Visual Studio DB edition

Preparing a demo of VSTS DB Edition for a customer the other day I ran in to some problems with creating a isolated sandbox environment.

The scenario I wanted to solve was to have a separate deployment configuration for my sandbox where I re-created the database every time I deployed. In my project settings I just wanted to do incremental deployments.

I started with opening the properties for my database project and changed the value of “Configure deployment settings for:” to “My Isolated development environment”.

 

I then add a new “Deployment configuration file” accepting the default name of “Username.user.sqldeployment”.

In that file I check the checkbox for “Always re-create database” and save the deployment config as well as the project config files.

I then test to deploy my database and nothing happens, I still just get an incremental deployment.

As I’m somewhat of a newbie on DB Edition I assume I did something wrong and start to look for the problem. After doing that for a while I gave up and posted a message to one of our internal mail aliases. This is one of the great things with working at Microsoft, whenever you need assistance you have a ton of fantastic colleagues that help out. I got a reply from Gert “Data Dude” Drapers where he pointed out that I had hit one of the issues in the DB Edition GDR that is fixed in the upcoming QFE of the Visual Studio 2008 Team System Database Edition GDR.

After installing the RC of the QFE the behavior is as expected.

How does the TFS Source Control Proxy interacts with the TFS AT

I was on a conf call the other day where I got a question regarding how the interaction works between the TFS AT and the source control proxy. The biggest issue was how the proxy keep track of that the request for a file from source control is from an authorized user. I didn't know the answer so I posted a question on our internal mail alias.

I got an excellent answer from Robert Horvick, one of the many skilled people in the TFS product group who described the interaction for me.

Since I was interested in the answer I thought someone else might be as well so I created a Visio drawing describing it and I thought I post it here.

TFS Branching Guide 2.0

The VSTS Rangers in cooperation with VSTS MVPs, Microsoft Services, and VSTS Product Team has released v2 of the TFS Branching Guide.

You can get it from Codeplex http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII.

This is a great piece of guidance in an area where there are lots of ways of doing things complex and thus hurt project velocity.

Error message when trying to access WSS Site Admin

This is a post describing an issue a Swedish customer asked me about in the spring of 2008 that is described here. Since I still see questions on this I decided to post it here as well.

The problem is that when trying to access SharePoint from the link in the Group Membership dialog in Team Explorer they get the following error.

"The Team Foundation Server could not locate the online Site Administration application for this team project portal in Windows SharePoint Services. The most likely cause of this error is that the language settings on the team project portal do not match the current language of your Visual Studio client. The location of Site Administration is specific to the language of the project portal. Contact the Team Foundation Server administrator for availability information of Site Administration for this project portal. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide."

The reason for this is that Team Explorer picks up the locale of the operating system when constructing the link URL. In Swedish that would be /Sites/TeamProjectName/_layouts/1053 and since the 1053 folder doesn't exists IIS returns a HTTP 404 Error that causes the error message above to be displayed.

Because of how SharePoint works this can be fixed by adding an empty folder under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS on the server hosting SharePoint and name it the same as the locale you want to support. In my case 1053.

When the folder is found IIS is ok and since there are no files in the folder SharePoint will look in the default location for the files.

For a list of locales and their corresponding numbers I found this resource.

To make sure that you dont have any issues when servicing TFS I would recommend that you remove any folders added before trying any servicing

 

TFS2008 on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008

Today I decided to create a TFS 2008 VPC environment using Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008.

In general I have to say that the installation went pretty smooth. I created a slipstream installer according to the instructions in the installation guide. Started with installing TFC and VS SP1 to make sure that everything was done according to instructions.

When the installation was done I configured TFS to use a FQDN according to the instructions in Buck's blog post. Then I was ready to test the installation.

I was logged on to the TFS server as TFSSetup, started Visual Studio, connected to TFS using my FQDN and selected to create a new team project. It took a little while and then the PCW ended with an error.

TF30224: Failed to retrieve projects from the report server. Please check that the SQL Server Reporting Services Web and Windows services are running and you have sufficient privileges for creating a project.

Looking at the project creation log I found the error

Exception Message: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: The permissions granted to user 'GALLIEN\TFSSetup' are insufficient for performing this operation. --->

I couldn't really figure out what I had done wrong, everything seemed to look correct. Since I was running in a VPC I had enabled the undo disk before configuring the FQDN so I decided to back the environment to that point and try if it was my configuration that caused the problem but with no luck, I still got the same error.

So after looking around a bit I realized that I didn't run VS with elevated permission when testing. That was it I was able to run PCW successfully, now I only have to redo the FQDN configuration :-)

Update:

After finalizing the installation I realized that even though reporting services was working, the reports didn't. As I found out, by reading this excellent blog post, this was because of the installation of SQL I used Network Service as service account and this was used by Analysis Services to access the SQL Server. After creating a user for Network Service and adding it to the TfsWarehouseDataReader role everything works.

Upgrading TFS 2005 to 2008 SP1

I have been helping a customer with moving their TFS 2005 server to new hardware and then upgrade it to 2008. I wanted to share some of the things I learned during this.

This are things that all are documented in blogs, forums etc. but I wanted to try to compile it in one post.

To avoid the error 29250 during the upgrade of TFS I created a slipstreamed installer according to the instructions in the installation guide. As you know this means that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 will be installed. What I didn’t know is that the .NET FW 3.5 installer can fail if the print spooler isn’t started. I found the exact same error I was experiencing described in Aaron Stebner’s blog.

Next issue with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is that it is incompatible with Windows SharePoint Services v2.0. This is described on the SharePoint Team blog, the workaround described there is not a viable option in the case of the TFS upgrade since it would probably render TFS unusable. The only thing I could figure out to do was to continue with upgrading WSS to WSS3.0 as described here.

When the WSS upgrade completed I found that I couldn’t open the Team Project Portal for any project that I hadn’t created. I only got the red X in team explorer, when trying to browse directly to the site I got an “Access Denied”. I didn’t understand this since I was using an account that was in the Local Administrators group on the server and it used to work before. I was playing around for a while but finally I had to give up and call my colleague Peter, who knows everything about SharePoint. He naturally told me that the security in SharePoint changed from v2.0 to 3.0, where WSS2 automatically gave you access to all the sites if your account either was a local admin or in the SharePoint Administrator Group set in Central Administration. In WSS 3.0 the same thing can be achieved by using “Policy for Web Application” that is found under the “Application Management” tab in Central Administration.

VSTS|TFS value adds for the future

My friend Willy-Peter is conducting a survey on what Value adds the community around VSTS|TFS wants to see in the future. Take the opportunity to influence the decision. 

About me

So, Then it has finally become my turn to start blogging. I have thought about it for a long time now but haven't come around to actually do something about it.

This, my first blog post ever is just to describe who I am and what I do.

My name is Christian Nielsen and I'm 41 years old. I live with my wife and two teenage daughters in an old house in the countryside approximately 30 km north of Gothenburg, Sweden.

I’m currently an employee of Microsoft Consulting Services in Sweden where I have specialized on our tools around Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server.

My intention with this blog is to document findings I do when working, both as a reference for myself but also I hope that it can be of help for others. You might also find some more personal posts about life on the Swedish countryside.

I hope you enjoy it and please give me feedback on the content.

Best regards, Christian