At my current client we have about 15 or so users of Team Explorer Beta 2 that needed to be upgraded to the RC client (since I upgraded the server to RC). Out of those 15 there were 2 cases of users experiencing installs that would crash after reaching the Complete/Custom selection screen. One of the users was on a laptop running XP SP 3 and the other was on a desktop running XP SP 3. After many attempts (command line install w/ supressed UI, registry changes, etc.) at getting the setup to run correctly and install a working copy of Team Explorer 2010 RC failed I did some searching and found a few people running into the same problem.
The general idea for a fix was that the Language Bar needed to be disabled in order for the install to be successful. So I gave it a shot and it worked. Both users are now happily running complete installs of Team Explorer 2010 RC. My steps taken are defined below:
- Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Regional and Language Options.
- On the Languages tab, under Text services and input languages, click Details.
- Under Preferences, click Language Bar.
- Deselect the Show the Language bar on the desktop check box.
- Extra step in my case: Remove handwriting recognition in the listbox on the parent window.
- If the language bar is still present on the taskbar right-click it and remove it.
Not sure what the language bar has to do with the setup.exe of Team Explorer or Visual Studio but this slight change turned a headache into a good day. If anyone has a reason of why this error is occuring please post it in the comments.
Hope this is helpful to those who find it.
I performed an in place upgrade of a TFS 2010 Beta 2 instance to and RC instance yesterday using this guide:
TFS Beta 2 to RC Upgrade Guide
The overall process was relatively smooth. There was only one hiccup at the very end of the "Upgrade from previous version" config wizard that almost had me in tears.
The last step was to upgrade all exisiting Project Collections. What it seemed to do was put each collection into a queue and then falg them as being serviced. While in this state nothing could be done to the collections and they were offline. The problem I had was that they never passed the first step of this process and remained in the offline/servicing status for about an hour. After searching for some sort of activity (logs, processes, etc..) I nearly cancelled the whole thing due to lack of information and the overall feeling that the process had hung up. Out of nowhere the config wizard closed, as if finished, and returned me to the TFS Admin Console.
I looked through the application tier and the project collections were still offline and still queued for servicing. So I made the decision to perform an almighty restart on the server and hope for the best. When the server finally botted back up I went back in the admin console to check the status again and what I found was what I had hoped for, the project collection upgrade process was back in full swing and completinhg without error.
Not sure if this was an isolated error or not, since it the RC was just released, but I hope that if others have this problem my journey will provide some help.
Seems as though the "destroywi" command has been moved from the Power Tools into the actual TFS administration executables. I case you were wondering here is the /? from the new destroy work item command in TFS 2010.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE>witadmin destroywi /?
Work Item Tracking Administration tool. (C) Copyright 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Destroys a work item or work items. Currently, work items can only be destroyed. Destroying a work item means the work item is physically deleted and cannot be restored. The system does not support logical (and thus recoverable) deletion of work items.
Usage: witadmin destroywi /collection:collectionurl /id:id [/noprompt]
/collection Specifies the Team Foundation project collection. Use a fully specified URL such as
http://servername:8080/tfs/Collection0.
/id Specifies the ID of the work item to destroy. Supports multiple IDs delimited by commas
such as 12,15,23 (with no whitespace).
/noprompt Turns off the confirmation message.
I was looking for this using the old "tfpt destroywi" command and kept getting errors saying the command didn't exist when I finally did some searching and came across the new home for the command. Could be pretty helpful if needed.
Looking to the future release of Expression Blend 4 I had some questions on how things will work with TFS. The main thing Iw as looking for was work item creation based on SketchFlow screens embedded within Expression Blend itself. Well I found out the other day that the extent of this integration has been expanded on from the previous release but it isn't as robust as I had hoped. The following is the main point of the conversation I had.
- You will be able to create TFS work items from SketchFlow feedback, but you will not be able to create general work items from within Blend – this had to be cut...
For those looking forward to heavier integration it looks like those items had to be cut but I imagine they will continue to be developed upon and will be released in the future.
Steps to make MS Project create a log file of exceptions occuring during the load/refresh/publish using the "TFSOfficeAdd-In.dll" component.
1) Navigaate to the directory that winproj.exe lives in. (Typically "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\[Version]\" where [Version] is the Office version I.E. Office12, Office14)
2) Create a new text file named winproj.exe.config
3) Add the following XML as the contents of the winproj.exe.config file:
<configuration>
<system.diagnostics>
<switches>
<add name="General" value="3" />
</switches>
<trace autoflush="false" indentsize="3" />
</system.diagnostics>
</configuration>
From now on, anytime an error occurs with your synch, a log file is created in the "%temp%" directory titled "tfs_msproject.log"
I was running into an odd problem today when trying to add some new custom columns to a Microsoft Project project plan. These fields were driven by the values in other columns, in other words they calculated columns that used custom formulas I created to poluate them with content. I had added new fields to my project plan and validated and tested the formulas. Next I updated my task.xml to contain the new fields in TFS and uploaded that, then changed the FieldMapping.xml to reflect the mapping.
I had only added two new fields (and have done this many times before) so I wasn't at all worried about failure. Sure enough when I hit refresh the first time I received "TF82039: Team Foundation was unable to modify the project plan". I knew I couldn't have done anything wrong so I was worried that the fact that these columns were calculated was the issue. After much searching and no results I decided to troubleshoot a little more. I removed the mapping to one of the columns in my FieldMapping.xml and tried to refresh again. Project/TFS magically completed the process with no errors. So I went back and added the other field back in and voila, worked like charm.
I'm still not sure what the deal was, or why it let me add the one at a time. SO, if you run into this problem, try adding the new mappings one at a time. It also might help to create a tfs_msproject.log file to get the stacktrace and exception that occurs in your case.
I'll post steps to ensure that that file gets created later.
Ran into this issue today when upgrading a SQL 2008 Express instance up to Enterprise and trying to run Sharepoint Configuration Wizard. Apparently SharePoint 2010 Beta doesn't like SQL 2008 Enterprise without a few hotfixes...Those of which are still in beta themselves...Those can be found in the full text of the error I recieved as follows:
"SQL Server at XXX has an unsupported version 10.0.2531.0. The minimum required SQL versions are SQL Server 2005 SP3 CU3, version number: 9.00.4220.00, downloadable from “http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967909”, or SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU2, version number 1.00.2714.00, downloadable from “http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970315”.
Anywho, I'm downloading now and will install tomorrow. I'll update with my findings from there.
Good luck.
Don't know how I missed this but the TFS 2010 Beta 2 PowerTools were released on December 17th 2009. Here is the link to the download page.
TFS 2010 Beta 2 PowerTools
Have fun!
Lately I have been diving deep into the world of TFS integration with MS Project 2007. What I mean by that is having a project plan that is created and then loaded into TFS as workitems. So the idea is that a PM can still manage their project in a tool that lends itself to that and that they feel comfortable with. One of the new features of TFS 2010 is that you can define work items as either a parent or a child of another.
This new relationship is fantastic when you are managing a small project andf you don't care about the structure of your project plan remaining the same. But what if you don't want any new work items created in TFS to "float" over to your plan through the MS Project/TFS client integration. In 2010, a design decision was made to recursively pull over all new work items that have a parent/child relationship with a task in your plan regardless of if you want then or not. In versions past the only way you could get new work items was to specifically click "Get Work Items" on the integration toolbar. So, like me, having new work items show up and start manipulating my data in Project will probably surprise you.
Have no fear, a work around is here!
Thanks to the help of certain MS employees I have been provided with a work around that will keep your original project plan consistent and allow you to manage new parent/child tasks solely in TFS. Should the time come when you, or your PM's, are managing the project this way. Follow the steps below for the fix.
1) Uninstall all remnants of VSTS 2010 or Team Explorer 2010 from machine
2) Download and install Team Explorer 2008 from - Team Explorer 2008
3) Download and install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 from - VSTS 2008 SP1
3) Download and install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 forward compatability patch from - VSTS 2008 Forward Compat Patch
4) Install in that order
5) Done
What happens is, the integration layer included in the MS Project 2007 client detects that, while you may be connecting to a 2010 TFS server, your local tool accessing it (Team Explorer 2008) doesn't have the ability to comprehend the new Parent/Child relationships. And voila, project will no longer be pulling your unwanted tasks into your project plan.
Hope this was helpful to someone else out there besides me haha....
After much frustration with MSDN and the instructions there here are the actual parameters to declare when using the TFSFieldMapping.exe for 2010 Beta 2.
Team Foundation Field Mapping Tool
Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Uploads or downloads the file that defines how fields are mapped between Microsoft Office Project and Team Foundation Server. To use this tool, you must be a member of either the Team Foundation Administrators group or the Project Administrators group for the team project that you specify.
Usage:
- TFSFieldMapping upload | download /collection:CollectionURI /teamproject:ProjectName /mappingfile:MappingFil
upload
- Uploads the field mapping file for the team project that you specify
download
- Downloads the field mapping file for the team project that you specify.
CollectionURI
- The URI of the team project collection. If you want to specify a virtual directory, use the following format: http://ServerName:Port/VirtualDirectoryName/CollectionName. If you do not want to specify a virtual directory, use the following format: http://ServerName:Port/CollectionName. If you have previously connected to the server, you can specify the friendly name for the server instead of the URI.
ProjectName
- The name of the team project.
MappingFile
- The path of the field mapping file, including the file name, that you want to upload or download.