Etienne's VSTS World

I've been considering my habits when it comes to reading and writing blog posts this morning while drinking my tea. 

"Should I post about the new version of x? Well... no, I think it was posted n number of times on MSDN blogs and by us geeks here on geekswithblogs.net"

So many people are watching the net for breaking news that it makes little sense to post about those myself, but as Guy told me a few weeks ago, not everyone aggregates MSDN blogs or Geekswithblogs.net for that matter so the people to aggregate you might like to know that product x as just shipped.  Well he is right but I still don't feel justified to post about news when I see n number of people already doing that elsewhere on the net.  Hey don't get me wrong I do post those news and point to others on numerous occasions but I try to keep it as low as I can.

Writing original content is very difficult it takes time, energy and some sense of journalism to come up with a good entry.  This is why sometimes there are long gaps between posts so I can "live it up" to have some good things to talk about.

So my question to you all is do you like it when people reproduce news items, link to other original content or do you prefer original content? Are blogs the new alerting system for new versions of products or industry news?

What are your thoughts on this

Cheers,

ET

So in the last few days a few good blog entries have appear on TFS.  Charles Sterling posted on how to change the product key in the trial or workgroup edition of TFS to the full version, now I knew how to do that (well I taught I knew) but it seems there are more things to do specifically for the workgroup edition have a look here.

Next came a great pdf from real world experience of move folks from VSS to TFS (I wish I had written that) from Steven St-Jean  it's a good read and I'll make it available to our folks internally as a reference (we have a lot of VSS like everyone else I suppose).  You can read it here.

Finally Mike Azocar posted his experience with moving a single server to a new machine an found out some of the steps can be confusing, he expands on the MSDN doc and tells of his gotchas.  Read it here.  The MSDN documentation will be updated based on his and others experiences.

Cheers,

ET

Technorati tags: vsts

lol.

The whole gang from the OD went to claim jumper tonight for dinner and as we were getting ready to leave, Charles "Chris" D was chatting with the waiter about getting the bill so I ask him "how are we splitting this up?" and he turn around and says "We are stiffin' you with the bill Frenchy" mouhaahaaha that was too funny had to blog it.

So we pay and are about to leave when Tom (another of the cohort) gets up and says "Gimme a minute I need to go the the little programmers room" mouhahaha we are such geeks... ;-).

Anyway I said I would blog it and there you have it.

Have a good one

ET

Check Eric's great tips on doing technical presentation

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlee/archive/2006/10/17/presentation-demo-tips.aspx

I do a lot of this myself in my tech demos, lots of great tips there.

Good job Eric,

Cheers,

ET

Hey everyone,

Just noticed my good friend Steven Borg from Accentient posted my TFS Install Scripts (Oct 05).  You can get them directly here.  The TFS install scripts are scripts I put together to automate as much as possible of the pre-requirement application installations TFS requires; IIS, SQL Server, Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, Service packs, TFS users (Service, report, setup).

I hope this helps you install your own TFS with the least amount of work.  TFS installation can hard, so I hope those scripts help you succeed.  Please tailor them to fit your environment and give me feedback about that worked out for you.

To start the installation run Team System Install.hta it's the driver application to the install process.

Thanks Accentient for hosting

Btw while your checking into tools to help you with TFS also check Accentient Widgets site here for tons of really excellent tools.

Cheers,

ET

Technorati tags: tfs, vsts

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide. As a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft. Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success every day.

Well there you have it ;-)

So what does it mean to me to be nominated as an MVP... It means a whole lot! For the second year in a row the Team System Product Team and the MVP award program feel I helped grow the awareness of TFS and VSTS in the community.  I have gone around the world this year talking about VSTS, did conferences, participated in the GUVSM User group in Montreal and blogged about VSTS.  Do I like VSTS? Do I have opinions about VSTS? The answer is a big YES! Do I think it could be better absolutely! And that's what I hope to help bring about by doing my best to influence the VSTS Product Team.  Your comments and feedback at all those events don't fall on deaf ears, I report back a lot of what I hear from you all to the product team so don't stop letting me know how you feel and how the product could be better, thrust me they listen, they listen a lot.

My second career (after leaving the IT industry...euh ya maybe not) would be to be a teacher. I love talking about technology, VSTS and Virtualization in particular.  Seeing understanding when just a moment before there was incomprehension is a great feeling. I love lively debates, brainstorming sessions, and one on one discussions those are all great way to find solutions to very hard industry problems.  So now I get the best of both world, I get to teach as a side job (conferences, UG, etc) which is great fun and touches that teacher cord and get to keep working in the IT industry which is my passion (and pays better than teaching which is somewhat of a shame... but that's a story for another day). 

So what does this award mean to me... Well it means a lot.  It makes me proud of what I did this year and I feel validated and invigorated to keep doing it this year (I would, even without the award ;-) but the distinction make it sweeter).

Thanks you Microsoft, Sasha, Guy, Product Team members (you know who you are) for this award. I very much appreciate it.

Cheers to all of you out there using TFS I hope to be of service this year to make your experience even better for now and in the future

ET

Well, Code Camp Montreal was a huge success, we add 320 register and about 260 showed up on a Saturday to attend the camp.  We had 12 speakers and 15 sessions.  In my two sessions I had about 70-80 people and it was great fun.  Lots of great questions and interest.

As I suspected, about 5% of the people are "actually" using TFS but it still generates a lot of interest, people want to move off of VSS but can't get their employer for small teams to purchase VSTx.  I suspect this is the main reason.   Another interesting stat I would say 80% of the room was still using VSS with is again not a surprise and a few using subversion.  I got through about 1/3 of what I wanted to demo, the product is HUGE.  I'm thinking of doing a workshop for everyone interesting and covering for a full day a lot more of TFS.  I'll try to arrange this with Guy the leader of GUVSM. 

I really liked the presentation I did on virtualization (the second one) I finished on the buzzer and there was a ton of great questions and people told me they learned a lot of little tricks and thing they hadn't tough about when using virtualization or thing they could do with it.  My plan was to get people to think of better ways to spend their time than mindlessly installing OSes or apps and getting to 'prepare' their virtual environment using Sysprep and using Differencing drives an undo disks.  I did a little demo of VSR2 extensibility using .NET by extending the demo the is available on MSDN here and creating a web site to launch the creation of VMs that can be used for say testing and when done, the use can simply destroy them to conserve resources (memory, disk).

All an all a great day, thanks to all the sponsors, volunteers, speakers and attendees for making this a great day.  Looking forward to the next one.

Now off to Seattle for a week ...

Cheers,

ET

Technorati tags: CodeCamp, GUVSM

If you use Vista as you main desktop OS like I do, we'll need to run Virtual PC 2007 since VPC 2004 in "incompatible" with Vista, As of today, the Connect site for the beta is accepting self-nomination.

We currently can't download the bits but they should be there shortly.  Can't wait to this build... Virtualization Rocks!!

Cheers,

ET

Update: The bits are now available to download...

Technorati tags: vpc, vista

So I just installed Vista RC2 and tried to install Visual Studio on it and kept getting a compatibility issue, I didn't have Windows XP SP2 ... well right!

So I started searching for a solution, first put autorun.exe in windows sp2 compat... no go, changed all setup.exe to run in windows XP SP2 compat ... no go.  I then stumpled on this blog entry

http://www.geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2005/11/30/61699.aspx

I refers to install VS on Windows XP SP1 (same kind of compat issue) but the trick work the same for this problem.  Essentially copy the VS directory from the install DVD to a disk, go to vs\setup and edit file vs_setup.pdi and comment out gencomp6 by adding a # in front of the line and then run autorun.exe like you normally would in the vs directory.  You should be good to go.  Then on to install SP1 Beta ohhh the joy.

Hope this help you guys on the bleeding edge...

Cheers,

ET

Update:  This was a clean install of Vista RC2 using Team Suite.  This used to work fine for every build of Vista since B2. 

Update 2: After further investigation, operator error might be the cause ;-)... I'm a bit trigger happy in Vista when things don't install the first time, I usualy just go to the compatibility tab and tick run as XP SP2 and try again... well that might have been my problem, for some reason the compatibility layer in Vista can't handle installing VS as XP SP2.  The VS team will let them know about that issue.  I don't know what triggered me to set compatibility to XP SP2 in the first place but if I had gone back to regular Vista install it probably would have worked.  Oh well at least there was A problem not the one I tought.  Sorry for the confusion everyone.  BTW the tip I posted works as a work around to the XP SP2 compat problem at least.

Technorati tags: vsts, vista

So we learn stuff everyday... well I hope.  Here is a bit of insight on Team Build, specifically the ports that need to be opened for it to work properly in a multi-machine scenario. 

I have tested this configuration internally and it works great. I did stumbled upon a problem while testing, an error message came up telling me that the build server could only be configured for a single TFS server, and that I should change a parameter on the build server to point to my TFS server.  So here is what we need to do to fix that 

Logon to the Build server and open file [install drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\tfsbuildservice.exe.config in this file we can customize the TFS server that is allowed to run Team Build.

In order to do this we need to change the AllowedTeamServer key/value pair and put in our TFS server in this format http://tfsserver:8080 once this is done we need to restart the Team Build Service and we should be good to go.

I noticed that there is also a key for the port which is 9191 by default.  I'm sure you can change it there but what I am unsure of is if you need to do anything on the application tier to let it know which port the Build Server uses.  I will dig into this a bit more and get back to you on this.

There is a way to not use UNC and use WebDav instead.  Here is a great forum article with answer by Buck Hodges that points to other articles about how to do just that right here

Hope this helps some of you out there who are wondering how the heck do I configure this Team Build beast...

Again let me know if this was useful

Cheers,

ET

Update: After speaking with Buck Hodges I confirmed a few things... So in the config file the port key is indeed the port that the build service will use to do the remoting communication with the AT.  In order to configure building on an alternate port, we need to change the web.config will for the AT at this location [install drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Build and change the port key to the new port.  Since this is a web.config file the server will restart by itself no need to recycle it.  What this means is that if we have muliple build server that the AT communicates to, we need to change the port and AllowedTeamServer keys on the build server config file to match.  So with this info we noticed that the relationship is one TFS Server to multiple build server and only on TFS server per build server.

Technorati tags: vsts

Visual Studio Team System Chat

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in Visual Studio Code Name Orcas September CTP and Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals CTP 5.

Join the chat on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time.

To add this to your calendar, click here.
To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

Technorati tags: vsts

Cheers,

ET