TFS

Fiddler and TFS don't play nicely

Yow-Hann Lee — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 07:40:15 GMT

As a continuation of my TFS post, most people who have come to use TFS as their centralized work, bug tracking and source control system will realize that it stops working when you have Fiddler on. A quick Google search will turn up a result relating to this at: http://groups.msn.com/HTTPFiddler/bugs.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=48. Unfortunately, the issue is not really about the order in which you start the apps.

Regardless of the order in which you start TFS and Fiddler, you will see an error along the lines of:

Team Foundation Error

Team Foundation Server * does not exist or is not acessible at this time.

Because Fiddler plays a role in incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic, you will get a 401 Access Denied response as opposed to a 200 with your response. As shown below, NTLM authentication fails.

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Content-Length: 83
Content-Type: text/html
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
WWW-Authenticate: NTLM
Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2007 07:09:16 GMT

<html><head><title>Error</title></head><body>Error: Access is Denied.</body></html>

You can still have both TFS and Fiddler on (as long as Data Capture is off). Your TFS client (Visual Studio 2005) simply talks to a web service. And having fiddler capture on means no access to below:
# AddConflict
# CheckAuthentication
# CheckIn
# CheckPendingChanges
# CreateAnnotation
# CreateCheckinNoteDefinition
# CreateTeamProjectFolder
# CreateWorkspace
# DeleteAnnotation
# DeleteLabel
# DeleteShelveset
# DeleteWorkspace
# Get
# GetRepositoryProperties
# LabelItem
# Merge
# PendChanges
# QueryBranches
# QueryChangeset
# QueryCheckinNoteDefinition
# QueryCheckinNoteFieldNames
# QueryConflicts
# QueryEffectiveGlobalPermissions
# QueryEffectiveItemPermissions
# QueryFileTypes
# QueryGlobalPermissions
# QueryHistory
# QueryItemPermissions
# QueryItems
# QueryItemsById
# QueryItemsExtended
# QueryLabels
# QueryMergeCandidates
# QueryMerges
# QueryMergesWithDetails
# QueryPendingChangesById
# QueryPendingSets
# QueryShelvedChanges
# QueryShelvesets
# QueryWorkspace
# QueryWorkspaces
# RefreshIdentityDisplayName
# RemoveLocalConflict
# Resolve
# SetFileTypes
# Shelve
# UndoPendingChanges
# UnlabelItem
# Unshelve
# UpdateChangeset
# UpdateCheckinNoteFieldName
# UpdateGlobalSecurity
# UpdateItemSecurity
# UpdateLocalVersion
# UpdatePendingState
# UpdateWorkspace

Installing ReSharper Removes 'Track Active Item' in Visual Studio

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:56:07 GMT

For whatever reason, when you install JetBrains ReSharper in Visual Studio 2005, it loses your 'Track Active Item in Solution Explorer' setting. I'm not sure if this is done intentionally on JetBrains part. While you get the nice feature of hitting ctrl-N or ctrl-shift-N to go directly to your Type or class file, it'd be great to retain the Solution Explorer option by default. Discoverability is greatly enhanced with both of these in place.

So for those who love ReSharper but have been annoyed at it losing 'Track Active Item in Solution Explorer', you can reset this option in your Visual Studio Options.

For those that can't find VS2005 TFS Power Toys...

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:38:30 GMT

For those that cannot find Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Power Toys anymore (i.e. you may have come across older blog entries of TFPT (Team Foundation Power Toys), they have renamed it Team Foundation Server Power Tool which can be found here.

Wonder if this has anything to do with Paul Litwin's "There's a Reason They are Called Toys" rant out TFPT. =)

All kidding aside though, I have to be in agreement with major roadblocks that TFS Source Control can incur on development teams. For one thing, I think it's already been well documented that the lack of built-in revert/roll back feature was just simply not a smart item to cut from their release. In this day and age, you would consider this as a standard feature but it was declared a cut feature early on (reference: MSDN Forums).

After having worked with the TFS version control offering for the last month, you start longing for the internal Microsoft tools and/or open source version control systems such as Subversion. These are the times when you wish you had adopted a new technology/tool in its V2/V3 cycle, when it has stabilized and matured.

It's not all bad though...I can see potential for improvement and am hopeful of its next release. Especially with the amount of AddIns created by the developer community to spark innovation within Microsoft. One example of this is: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/files/folders/leon/entry10828.aspx. Also, several TFS tools can be found at CodePlex.

Security Links of the Day:

So it's been a while since I've done a security entry (my last one being "Safeguarding Your Website/App Code From User Input.."). Well, I still haven't come around to doing another one. Instead, taking the path of least resistance, here are a couple links to the recent news.

Web attackers get better at hiding

Report: Targeted e-mail attacks increasing