Effective Thoughts

You're on yet another Zoom call and...wait what did she say? Dang it...Internet glitching again! You quickly mute your audio and video. "Kids! Get off YouTube...I'm on a call!" With everyone working and schooling from home, your Internet can't keep up. The cable company keeps claiming you're on their "super-fast Internet" but everything keeps lagging. It's all so frustrating and you just want to get your work done.  It may not be the cable company's fault. Use this approach to ensure your household enjoys a super-fast, reliable Internet! Start with the Source Run a speed test. Google "speed test" . Run that test a few times on a given day. If you're not getting at least 50Mbps download and 10Mbps upload speeds, keep reading.  Check with your Provider and do your Homework Reach out to your Internet provider. This may be your cable company or telephone provider. Understand your current plan: What package are you currently on? Wha...

My son and I throughly enjoyed watching The Ohio State University Buckeyes shred the Miami of Ohio Redhawks on a recent Saturday afternoon. Following an early afternoon downpour, the humidity and recently-cleared skies brought a healthy glimmer to everyone's skin. It was hot. Which makes folks thirsty. A few years back, Ohio State, like many other universities, began selling beer during football games. As a college student and later as an alumni, I experienced some of the greatest tailgating in the country--frequently enjoying a beverage or two. Why not bring it inside and further line the pockets of the university? The argument at the time centered less around the fiscal and more around alleviating the need for ticketholders to drink intensely immediately before the game knowing they would need to last through a 4 hour contest. The university claimed people would enter the stadium less intoxicated knowing they could get their fill inside. I would love it if the Sociology dep...

Recently, Microsoft pushed the " Creators Update " out to Windows 10. It was available in April but it seems to have been force-pushed in the past 2 days. On my mother-in-law's computer, Creator's caused Excel to render a "Bad Image" message when attempting to start declaring "MSVCP140.dll is either not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error". I attempted the SFC and DISM repairs as advised on Tom's site to no avail. When I attempted an Office repair, Office disappeared completely. At this point, I definitely started to panic. Fortunately, I noticed a pending reboot due to an install/update. Allowing Windows to install that update and rebooting twice brought Excel and Office back to life. I did have to re-register the software but all is well now. If you encounter this issue, stop what you're doing and install/restart Windows. Anecdotally, I've since hear of many folks encountering similar issues.

Published on the  Cardinal Blog  " Perfect is coming! But not 'til Tomorrow "

The touchpad on my oven at my house died about a month ago. It’s a Kenmore so I called Sears. Tough to get that first appointment so they first came out last Saturday. I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong and priced out the part alone at $200. When they offered a $275 “we’ll fix it or replace it with a warranty”, I jumped on it. (It’s worth $75 to avoid me screwing up my oven and have my wife be mad at me. Come to think of it, that’s probably worth a lot more than $75.) Upon arrival, the technician gave me a hard time about the lack of a serial number on the microwave. Huh? (It’s an oven/microwave stack combo and apparently, the serial number is a prerequisite to my service deal.) Is it my fault the serial number is a dinky sticker inside the microwave? No. We found it on the manual but nonetheless, don’t bother me with this. Just fix it. The technician diagnosed the bad touchpad (“control panel”) and said he would need to order the part. Fine. I then scheduled the next appointment...

(Cross-posted at http://www.coalmg.org/ ) Both Alexei and I enjoy working on the COALMG group. However, within the last few months, both of us took on new roles in our careers and struggle to find the time to line up speakers and keep things running smoothly. To that end, we would like to open up COALMG to new leadership. Alexei and I would still remain involved (as well as Brian Prince) from a "board"/guidance perspective but we want someone to really drive: schedule strong presenters, question the current setup, drive membership, sponsors, etc. We have a great following and there's tons of potential. COALMG is a fantastic opportunity for someone with energy, a passion for great software and a desire to get involved in the community. We look forward to hearing from you! If you're interested, shoot me an email at jeff dot hunsaker at gmail.

Posting this one for the search engines. If you ever receive the exception "The type initializer for 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Server.BuildInformationNodeBinder' threw an exception.", more than likely, your drive space is at 0 on your TFS application tier box. I encountered this at a client recently. The root cause was that IIS logs had filled up the OS drive (C:\). I switched IIS logging to the applications drive (D:\) which cleaned up the OS drive and resolved the issue. Detailed message: TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension: Date (UTC): 6/7/2011 4:18:53 PM Machine: TFSATBOX Application Domain: /LM/W3SVC/8080/ROOT/tfs-1-129519118182628600 Assembly: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a; v2.0.50727 Service Host: 7ecfbd77-b386-4d75-b038-b05474782696 (DefaultCollection) Process Details: Process Name: w3wp Process Id: 367...

If you're experiencing "Query execution failed for dataset 'ds[Whatever]'. ", more than likely, your warehouse processing is failing. Going into the Admin Console or invoking the web service directly , invoking the Start Rebuild action, I kept receiving a TF221122. Finally, when I added the account under "Account for accessing data sources" under the "Analysis Services" tab to the SQL Server Tfs_Warehouse database TFSEXECROLE role, processing began to succeed again. Whew.

Brian Keller just updated the soon-to-expire (12/15) all-up Visual Studio/TFS 2010 VM . Make sure to download the latest refresh! From Brian: What’s new in the December 2010 Refresh? The version of this virtual machine which was refreshed on December 9, 2010, includes the following additions: · Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 · Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools (September 2010 Release) · Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools (these are disabled in VS so that the screenshots of the hands-on-labs still match; you can quickly enable the Productivity Power Tools via Tools -> Extension Manager from within Visual Studio) · Test Scribe for Microsoft Test Manager · Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Process Template · All Windows Updates through December 8, 2010 · Lab Management GDR (KB983578) · Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 pre-requisite hotfix (KB2403277) · Microsoft Test Manager hotfix (KB2387011) · Minor fit-and-finish fixes based on customer feedback · A new expiration date of ...

I'm honored to be presenting at the DogFood Conference again this year. I'll be delivering a session entitled "Engaging nondevelopers in Visual Studio 2010/TFS/ALM" on Friday. Hope to see you there! Update (11/03/2010): I posted my deck on SkyDrive...but you still need to attend in person! (Lots of demos...)

I couldn't find specific reference to installing the Scrum template onto SharePoint 2010 so I thought I would confirm that it does indeed work. A few tips: The MSI installer does not apply the process template nor install the SharePoint feature. You need to upload the template manually and run STSADM.exe commands to deploy the TFS WSP. Follow the ReadMe.txt files in the installation directories for the template and the feature, respectively. The path in the SharePoint installation ReadMe.txt file refers to the STSADM.exe path in the "12 hive" but this switches to the "14 hive" for SharePoint 2010. Just replace the paths to ../12/.. with ../14/..

In my experience, there's a lot of animosity and poor communication between Development and QA . It's not that they don't appreciate one another so much as they never seem to stay on the same page. QA : "What's the status on defect #4874?" Dev: "Done." QA : "Done?" Dev: "Yeah, I fixed that Tuesday." QA : "Err, ok . Well where is it? I mean where can I verify it?" Dev: "No clue. I committed it Tuesday. It passed unit tests and built successfully." QA : "Alright. I'll track it down." Invariably , QA speaks with the build manager (if there is one) to find the build in which that defect was repaired. After discovering the correct build, now QA needs an environment stood up to house that build. But wait, the UAT environment is currently testing the next release. It can't be disturbed for another week. At this point, the QA person's blood pressure heads for unsafe levels and the Dice.com bro...

Recently, my laptop hard drive started emitting the dreaded, " kerklunk , rriiipppphphhhh " noise. Oh yes, you've awoken in a sweat with this nightmare, haven't you? It's a sure sign of a failed drive coming down the pike. Incoming ! Rather than suffering the life-shattering disruption of an unrecoverable drive, I called a Code Blue...and here's what I did: Background: I have Win7 64-bit running on a Dell Latitude D830 with a bay-mounted SATA external 500GB drive and an external USB 500GB drive. Download Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition ; install Use Paragon B&R to create a full backup of my existing hard drive (including MBR /Master Boot Record) onto my external USB drive (about 1/2 the size of my total hard drive) Use Paradon B&R to restore from the external USB drive to the external bay drive Shut down Windows7 Swap primary hard drive with external bay drive Start up Windows7 Order new hard drive to replace old, busted, Kerklunk drive...

In case you missed it, Brian Harry announced Microsoft's Scrum process template this week at TechEd in New Orleans. Very exciting. Great work, Aaron and team!

Thanks to all who attended Alexei's and my Scrum for TFS 2010 Thursday at the Path to Agility conference. Please contact us if you have follow-up questions. We posted the deck here .

I'll be leading a panel and presenting at the Path to Agility conference Thursday May 27th. The panel at 1:15PM is entitled "Attracting and Leading Agile Developers". The presentation at 3:00PM is entitled "Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010". Hope to see you there!

Recently, I had an inquiry about where the " Changeset Comments Policy" went for Check-in Policies...check the Power Tools . Before installing Power Tools… After installing Power Tools…

Congratulations to the Microsoft team for recently releasing the much anticipated Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010. My firm is embarking on several roll-outs right off the bat so I wanted to capture some of our efforts. To start, lets just provide the basics: TFS 2010 Installation Guide TFS 2010 Administration Guide Visual Studio Rangers Guidance Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Training Kit Application Lifecycle Management Online Assessment MSF for Agile Software Development 5.0 Process Guidance Team Foundation Server Power Tools April 2010

If you experience TF255437: Access is denied while installing TFS 2010 on a remote/separate data tier, likely, the setup account is not a member of the local Administrators group on that data tier machine.

I'm excited to deliver a break-out session at The Path to a-gil-i-ty conference coming up May 27th. The presenter line-up looks fantastic...I'm eager to sit in on the other talks! I'll be speaking along with Alexei Govorine on managing Scrum projects leveraging the recently released Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. Click here for COAAH write up and registration . My firm, Cardinal Solutions is a sponsor.