Etienne's VSTS World

The Groupe d'usagers Visual Studio Montréal has changed name for Communauté .NET Montréal to better reflect it's activities.

What's new?  A 4th meeting each month, this time at lunch hour.  It's called @Lunch and it will be less formal and more of a discussion type of meeting inspired by Open Space and Alt.NET meetings.

Check out the new site here:
http://www.dotnetmontreal.com

The great DevTeach conference is coming to Montreal this year again from December 1-5 and i’ll be speaking again.  I have 2 sessions in the new Team System track:

Adopting Team System
You have seen the Team System overviews, you are stoked and want to start using the product but you’re not sure where to start? This session is for you, in it we will open the box and look inside, we will discuss the various installation scenarios (solo developer or for a group, hardware vs. Virtual), the difference between the various Visual Studio SKUs, the adoption rate of all the new features now available in VSTS and how we should adopt them, and finally touch on Customization of Team Foundation Server. We will finish with the best practices of usage.

Team System Process Customization
In this session we’ll create a brand new process template and look at the various possibility that we have to customize it. New work item types, new process, new reports. Everything you always wanted to know about customizing a TFS template and more.

Has always this should be fun.

Cheers,

ET

there you have it.  Check this post of all the info. .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 are Available!

Cheers,

ET

Hello everyone,

With SQL 2008 shipping late last week it was time to try my hands at this scenario.  It worked great but with a few things to remember.  Here is the lowdown.

There are two way to go about in order to install TFS with SQL 2008 1) Fresh install, 2) Upgrade SQL.

1) Fresh Install

I used Windows 2008 because this is going to be the prevalent OS to install on when people are going to start fresh or it most likely will.  There was a little issue with that install when Windows 2008 RTM’ed back in February and I talked about it in this post.  I wanted to see if the WSS issue was resolved in SP1.  Well the good news is yes.  When installing TFS, the experience is now the same for Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 and to boot, the SP1 now updates the WSS bits on the RTM DVD to WSS 3.0 SP1.  Cool.

The problem is SQL 2008 now.  You can’t use TFS 2008 RTM to install with SQL 2008.  You need to slipstream (or Integrate) the SP on top of the RTM bits.  The new install instruction covers this but here is a step by step.

a) Copy the original Media to a folder on any machine say d:\tfs\RTM

b) Extract the SP to a folder say d:\tfs\SPExtract

C:\SP1Download\TFS90SP1-KB949786-ENU /extract:d:\tfs\SP1Extract

c) Create a directory to put the result of the integration in say d:\tfs\ATIntegrated

d) Integrate (slipstream) the SP to the AT install by using this command line (note if you are in Windows 2008 make sure you start you console window as an Administrator or you’ll get prompted by UAC when executing the command).

msiexec /a C:\TFS\RTM\AT\vs_setup.msi /p C:\TFS\SP1Extract\TFS90sp1-KB949786.msp TARGETDIR=C:\TFS\ATIntegrated

e) Once you have done this make sure you copy back the ATIntegrated content to the original AT in the d:\TFS\RTM\AT overriding the original content. 

Now you might be tempted to do the same integration with the Build and Proxy directory since they both have a vs_setup.msi file I know I was and actually did.  You can’t.  I works (well it looks like it does) but when you run the setup, it fails miserably.  This is documented by Microsoft to NOT do that for Build and Proxy.  You need to install the RTM version and then run the SP on top of it.  It would have been nice to have a new DVD with all component SP’ed but it’s not to be.

f) After you have copied back the content to the original RTM directory, just burn a new ISO or DVD and you’re ready to install it.

NOT QUITE…

If you want to have Team Explorer (TE) on your server to create new project like I do, you need to install it BEFORE you install SQL 2008 and apply the TE SP1 also before IF you want to install the client tools as part of the SQL 2008 install which you most likely will to manage backups and verify tables, etc.  This problem is fully explained in this KB, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 may be required for SQL Server 2008 installations. If you want to create an all in one server with Studio and Build for example you need to follow the same procedure.  Here is an ordered list;

i) Windows (2003/2008) + IIS

ii) VSTS and/or TE 2008

iii) SP1 of VSTS and/or TE (it’s the same one that installs for all version of VS/VS Core, you need to run it once for anything component you have installed)

iv) SQL 2008 + Component like DB, RS, AS, Client Tools, etc (follow the install guide instructions, i'll try to post an unattended install file when I have one)

v) TFS SP1 (integrated), this will now install WSS properly for both Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 so no need to install it before.

vi) TFS Build + TFS SP1 (which is a different SP then the VS one)

vii) TFS Proxy + TFS SP1

viii) Office components (note this can be anytime I just like to install at the end)

You should then be in business… at least I was.  It took about 3h considering I already had a base 2008 VM.  The SP takes a long time to install but it works fine.  Double-click and wait.

Note that this is the way I did it.  I just read a few minutes ago that if you are starting fresh you can install SQL 2008 with everything you need and then install VS on top of it and then apply the SP.  That sounds weird to me since a version of VS SP will be already installed when you try to install VSTS RTM… would that work… I haven’t tried.  According to Aaron it should… Hold off on installing SQL 2008 if you have Visual Studio 2008 RTM installed - for now (see on the bottom of this post).  I know what I just documented works I’ve done that.

2) Upgrade SQL

Well that’s a bit trickier, Chris Rathjen from Microsoft sent me this info about that upgrade path

i. Start downtime

ii. Upgrade SQL2005 to SQL2008; AT will stop working at this step

iii. Apply TFS SP1 (and VS sp1 if the client is on the AT); AT will work again

iv. Verify full functionality

v. End downtime

If you apply SP1 before the upgrade, there’s an extra step:

i. Start downtime

ii. Apply TFS SP1 (and client…)

iii. Upgrade SQL2005 to SQL2008; AT will stop working at this step

iv. Repair TFS AT; AT will work again

v. Verify functionality

vi. End downtime

Well there you have it a somewhat complete picture of the upgrades and installs of the various Service Packs.  It was much less painful than the VS 2005 experience and I have to give kudos to Microsoft for that.  That was a hard experience.  I hope this will be useful to you, and don’t hesitate to leave me a comment if you have any issues and I will get answers for you.

Good luck,

ET

I really meant to post about ImageCup but when I came back I went strait to vacation and now it feels like ages ago.  I was a great competition again this year.  I’m always impressed by the quality of the ideas that the student come up with.  We saw things like water management off farms (the winners), electricity consumption solution, home automation, CO2 monitoring, controlled species monitoring, and much more, the subject being creating a sustainable environment those are pretty big problems to tackle.  It’s the second time I judge for the IC and for the second time it was really great.  This year we had a single pool for all the team and that way the top 12 teams where indeed the top 12 teams.  I was a little sceptic at first but in the end I think it was best for everyone.

Next year it’s in Cairo Egypt, I’m really looking forward to participating again.  The judging will be much harder since it’s an open theme, so it’s going to be hard to compare and note.  Should be exiting though.

Until next year, here is a picture of the winners team SOAK Australia.

Those are all the winners

This was the announcement of the Cairo competition…

Cheers,

ET

I'm a judge for the Software Design Invitational category again this year.  I'm super exited about this.  This event is probably the best event you can ever participate and judge in.  The energy at this competition is awesome and everyone put in 200% effort to give the best presentation of their product that they can.  It's impressive to see the amount of work those students put in their solution and this year well be really cool because the subject is the environment.  I can't wait to see what they come up with.  I was blown away last year with what I saw.  Should be really good again this year.

The competition is in Paris in early July.  I will keep you posted with pictures and information then.

I really looking forward to this.  See you in Paris if you are there when I'm there.

Cheers,

ET

I could not pass on this blog post and tell you about that.  Go watch this and appreciate it for what it is; A great geek gadget... I WANT ONE

Brian the Build Bunny

You can get that bad boy here.

Rock on Martin!

Cheers,

ET

Here is a tool I use all the time. Get the update right here.

Additonal Guest Operating System support:
Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Vista® Business Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Vista® Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Server® 2008 Standard
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3
Additional Host Operating System support:
Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Vista® Business Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows Vista® Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3

Cheers,

ET

Someone at my User Group meeting last Monday asked me if there was a comparative chart to which version of VS he should buy.  I couldn't remember where it was at the time so here it is freshly revised too.

Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison

Cheers,

ET

Brian just announce the features list that will be available in the SP1 version of TFS 2008.  Wow that's an impressive list of features... Check them out here

Cheers,

ET

I will be a speaker at DevTeach Toronto, May 12-16.  This is a small very interesting conference with a ton of great content and a lot of great speakers.  Here is a nice description of what it is. 

DevTeach is innovating with its Silverlight 2.0 workshop in Toronto

For the first time an independent conference is having a workshop on Building Business Applications with Silverlight 2.0.  Join Rod Paddock and Jim Duffy as they give you a head start down the road to developing business-oriented Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with Microsoft Silverlight 2.0. In case you just crawled out from under a rock, Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in positioned to revolutionize the way next generation Rich Internet Applications are developed. Microsoft’s commitment to providing an extensive platform for developers and designers to collaborate on creating the next generation of RIAs is very clear and its name is Silverlight 2.0. In this intensive, full-day workshop, Rod and Jim will share their insight and experience building business applications with Silverlight 2.0 including a review of some of the Internet’s more visible Silverlight web applications. This workshop is happening on Friday May 16 at the Hilton Toronto.

http://www.devteach.com/PostConference.aspx#PreSP

Party with Palermo, DevTeach Toronto Edition…

Jeffrey Palermo (MVP) is hosting Monday May 12th in Toronto is acclaimed ‘’Party with Palermo’’. This is the official social event  kicking off DevTeach Toronto. The event is not just for the attendees of Toronto it’s  a free event for everyone. It’s a unique chance for the attendees, speakers and locals  to meet and talk with a free beer.   The event will be held at the Menage club  location and you need to RSVP to attend. Get all the details at this link:

http://www.partywithpalermo.com/

Bonus session: .NET Rock host a panel May 14th at 18:00

This year the bonus session (Wednesday May 14 at 18:00) will be a panel of speakers debating the Future of .NET. Where is .NET going? How will new development influence .NET and be influenced by .NET? Join Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks as they moderate a discussion on the future directions of .NET. The panellists include individuals who have strong visions of the future of software development and the role that .NET can play in that future. Attend this session and bring your questions to get some insight into the potential future of .NET! Panelists are: Ted Neward, Oren Eini ,Scott Bellware

http://www.devteach.com/BonusSession.aspx

Keynote by Scott Hanselman, Microsoft

Scott Hanselman is one of the most prolific, renowned and respected blogger (http://www.hanselman.com) and podcaster (http://www.hanselminutes.com) about technologies. Scott is a hands-on thinker, a renowned speaker and writer. He has written a few books, most recently with Bill Evjen and Devin Rader on Professional ASP.NET. In July 2007, he joined Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager in the Developer Division. In his new role he'll continue to explore and explain a broad portfolio of technologies, both inside and outside Microsoft. He aims to spread the good word about developing software, most often on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years and before that he was a Principal Consultant at STEP Technology for nearly 7 years.

http://www.devteach.com/keynote.aspx

Bonus session: .NET Rock host a panel May 14th at 18:00

This year the bonus session (Wednesday May 14 at 18:00) will be a panel of speakers debating the Future of .NET. Where is .NET going? How will new development influence .NET and be influenced by .NET? Join Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks as they moderate a discussion on the future directions of .NET. The panellists include individuals who have strong visions of the future of software development and the role that .NET can play in that future. Attend this session and bring your questions to get some insight into the potential future of .NET! This bonus session is free for everyone. Panelists are: Ted Neward,Oren Eini ,Scott Bellware

Cheers,

ET

I meant to blog about this for a while now but Willy just beat me to it.  We had a discussion about this this morning and he did a great entry check it out Team Foundation Server - Why can all valid users see all Team Projects?

Thanks Willy.

Cheers,

ET

I'll preface this by saying this works for renaming your TFS server for internal use.  I have not tried this for external use.  There might be some more steps to get it to work from the Internet.

In the past month we migrated our infrastructure from 2005 to 2008 and in order to upgrade we needed to change a few things.  If you recall from this my blog post on the subject Changing to a friendly Team Foundation Server Name we changed the NETBIOS name a new nicer to remember name.  Well it turns out that in order to upgrade we needed to change some tables row back to the original server name.  There are two location you'll need to change manually to get the upgrade going.

Open SQL Management Studio

Navigate to the TFSIntegration

Change url values in table tbl_service_interface.  Anything that has the friendly name change to the NETBIOS name.

Change value in the tbl_registration_extended.  Anything that has the friendly name change to the NETBIOS name.

Now you can upgrade.

After the upgrade you'll probably want to change it back to the friendly name, I know I wanted too ;-).

So there was a lot of the manual changes that we needed to do before (see previous post) that are now in the command line.

1) Navigate to x:\program files\Microsoft visual studio 2008 team foundation server\tools

2) run TfsAdminUtil ActivateAT tfs.myorg.mycompany.com

3) This will change the names in the DBs and the proper web configs and registry entry (what we needed to do by hands before)

4)  On thing you still need to do is to navigate to x:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008\TFSServerScheduler and change the TFSServerScheduler.exe.config and change

[ADD value="http://rtmtgbs001 :8080" key="TFSNameUrl" /]

To

[ADD value="http:// tfs.myorg.mycompany.com:8080" key="TFSNameUrl" /]

This is a small change from 2005 we keep the same key and just change the value.  After changing that we need to restart the TFSServerScheduler.

5) You will need to add few zones in SharePoint Administration v3.  Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration

6) Operations > Alternate Access Mappings (that's under global configuration)

7) Add two mappings

internal URL

http://tfs.myorg.mycompany.com             Zone: Intranet

http://tfs.myorg.mycompany.com:17013   Zone: Intranet

You need to do this so that the document node in Team Explorer will map to the proper URL.

You should be good to go after that.

Cheers,

ET

So in this post I will revisit a post I wrote a while back TFS Server Administrators (when you can't be a Windows server administrator).

Is it possible to manage a TFS instance without being a windows administrator? Well I'm aware of one thing right now I can't do as a regular application administrator.  There are probably others but we are able to be pretty affective by following the steps in this and the previous post.

I wrote the first post about a year and half ago and after going through many upgrades, and setting up a management teams for TFS I stand by what was in there.  In the past month we have upgraded our infrastructure from 2005 to 2008 and pretty much everything still worked for our administrators except for WSS v3.  Now I could go and talk about my feelings about WSS but I won't ;-).  Here is where you need to add permissions in order to administrator WSS and be 1) be able to create Team Project 2) be able to see all the previously created project portal and all the newly created project portals.

So after our upgrade of WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 we tried creating a project and the PCW (project creation wizard) would fail immediately (after 5 sec) with an error that it couldn't access WSS.  Now at this point I started looking all over the WSS administration interface to try and figure out where to change security to let my windows group by SharePoint admins.  So you would think that it would be easy to find a menu entry that said "click here to add the Huber god windows group so that they can do everything in SharePoint" but sigh... it was not to be.  After adding my user (to start) to just about every submenu that said anything about security I still was failing immediately in PCW.  I then went to the event logs to find out if anything was showing up there... well a few information message about ASP.net, a few warning about some TFS upgrade things I needed to look at and well nothing that jumped to my face really.  Well it turns out that the information ASP.NET message was actually talking about having an access denied on some web page... now if you're like me at this point you are shaking your head and saying why was it an information message well... I don't know.  I'm just trying to save you time here :-).  So that clued me into a nice new direction (I didn't tell you I spent %$#*^! hours looking for a direction) which after spending way to much time looking at a computer screen and being delirious with windows security dialogs was a welcome respite. I decided I was going to click just about anywhere to find something that would get me out of the jam, that error informational message was a ray of bright light at 2am... it had a link

http://mytfsserver:17013/_vti_adm/admin.asmx

Now you might think I should know about that url since it's used to provision new WSS site.  Well you'd be right I did know about this link but it worked for me.  in the error informational message there was some info on impersonation of users, specifically the user account that I was using to create new project (not me) so I ran IE as that user and tried navigating to that link... Access Denied... haHA!! and a new nice error informational message in the event log.  Great I can now repro easily and it looks like a permission thing... well I knew that?!?  So how to fix this. 

There are two ways to fix this. 

1) The easy way > Add you TFS administrator group to the WSS_ADMIN_WPG group (looks obvious in retrospect...)

2) The hard way that enabled the easy way > Open IIS Manager > ServerName > Web Sites > SharePoint Central Administration v3 > _vti_adm

- Right click on _vti_adm and select properties

- click on ASP.NET Tab

- Click on Edit Configuration...

- Select the Authorization Tab

Now at this point you might be asking yourself why did he go there... well it was 2am I can't recall.  but what you will see is this

- What you need to do is add you group to the Local authorization rules... what was happening was that as an administrator (first allow) or a member of the WSS_Admin_WPG (second allow) I can can create new sites but everyone else was deny!!!  I you go this route make sure that the deny * is the last one (it's order specific).  Note also that the users/group are in the roles column not users.  So you'll need to click the checkbox besides roles to enable the textbox to fill with your group/users.

-Click OK a few times and you should be good to go (changing the web.config which is what this does resets the appdomain so you don't need to do an IISReset).

Now that go me passed the first immediate failure... so the PCW started going...going...going... and failed on guess what access denied in SharePoint... WHAT! ... sigh... that means there must be another location to add users too.... well yes.

You need to add your group the the SharePoint Farm administrators here how to do this.

Navigate (as a server admin for now) to the SharePoint Admin V3 site http://mytfsserver:17013 (or whatever port you are using).

Central Administration > Operations > Update farm administrator's group > add and add your group to this section.

After I did that, the PCW completed successfully.  Great I can now create TFS Project and WSS site without being an administrator.

SharePoint security was really tightened in v3 and the way that TFS creates new project sites by creating a new site collection makes so that only the project creator can actually see the portal site until he manually adds all the other users on his group to the site.  Now that's ok for the site owner and I can live with that but it creates a little problem for the TFS server administrators where they can go to the site unless the project owner adds them.  If that is what you want than the default security in WSS will server you perfectly.  For we need our admin to be able to solve issues and they need to have access to those sub-sites.   Here is what you need to do in order to do that.

Central Administration > Application Management > Policy for Web application > add users and add your group to this section (make sure you select "all zones" and "full control" in the little add users wizard (you don't need operate as System)

Once you do that you should have all the rights you need to create new TFS project and view/monitor/administrate any sharepoint project on you TFS box.

I hope this will save you a lot of hours of hunting down all those locations.

Cheers,

ET

I was saddened to hear that Gary Gygax had passed away last week.  Mr. Gygax is one of the inventors of the Dungeon and Dragon tabletop game.  You could say he started a sub-culture which is no small thing.  Most of the RPG games (video or tabletop) all take something from D&D.  I started playing in the 80s and I am a still a regular gamer 25 later.  D&D helped me learn English, stay out of trouble, fantasize about adventures, travelling to other worlds and dealing with other cultures.  It is also great for exteriorizing yourself through role playing.  My son will soon join us at the table and it's really interesting how he sees the game now with the age of video games.  I hope he joins us and doesn't feel it's too slow ;-).

Good times playing D&D... Goodbye Mr. Gygax and thanks for inventing such a great past time. RIP.

Cheers,

ET