Effective Thoughts

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...

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...)

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!

Had a fantastic audience Friday for my VSTS 2010 Overview presentation at DogFoodII . Thanks for coming. I wanted to follow up on some of the questions with more complete responses. Q. Will 2008/5 custom SSRS reports fail following the upgrade? A. One key aspect here is “custom”. 2010 significantly changes the data warehouse schema (…which drives most reports). So, existing reports will need some work to function properly under 2010. That said, the VSTS team upgraded/updated the process templates and reports for Agile and CMMI to work properly against the 2010 schema. If you have custom reports, you’ll need to update them manually. Excellent information from Aaron Bjork here . Q. Will 2008/5 customizations to team builds fail following the upgrade? A. After doing some internal reading, I think this will actually work ok and upgrade successfully. The process template upgrade solution will wrap custom builds in a “legacy” MSBuild file and simply call Team Build against it. That s...

Thanks for coming to my VSTS 2010 (Beta2) presentation at DogFoodII in Columbus. I've posted the deck here and will publish a follow-up post with Q&A from the session. Special thanks and appreciation to Randy Pagels , Microsoft Developer Solution Specialist for the Heartland District for supplying a lot of the material. Randy maintains an excellent resource on VSTS/TFS at http://www.teamsystemcafe.net/. Also, special thanks for the VSTS MVPs for helping us learn and understand what's coming in 2010.

Very excited to announce we've (well, Alexei deserves all the credit) landed Doug Neumann for COALMG 's November meeting! Date/Time: Thursday November 5th, 6PM, Polaris Microsoft Office (4th Floor) Abstract: Visual Studio 2010 is almost here, and with it comes a host of new capabilities for application lifecycle management in Team Foundation Server. In this talk, we'll survey the new features in TFS 2010, starting with enhancements to the core features of version control, work item tracking, and build automation and then venturing into new capabilities for executing agile projects, managing quality assurance activities, and simplifying the provisioning of virtualized testing environments. There's a lot to learn with Team Foundation Server 2010, but this talk will cover the foundations and get you on your way to becoming an expert. Biography: Doug Neumann has been working on Team Foundation Server since its inception in early 2003 when he was responsible for designing...

Last week, I delivered a VSTS 2008 Tester Edition demo to a prospective client. Following up on a few questions to which I didn’t know the answer: Q. Can I use Subversion with TFS? A. I get this question all the time from developers. It’s a perfectly valid question. The answer is no…but yes…sort of. The version control repository (and all data) must remain SQL Server. Yes, it’s proprietary. Further, if you plan to use TFS in your software development environment, but choose not to leverage it for version control, it severely limits the usefulness of the information elicited from TFS (because you’re not feeding in the crucial VC data). If you’re not leveraging VC in TFS, you’re probably not leveraging Team Build either. That said, while a fully-integrated TFS for ALM and SCM is the ideal, there’s a compelling argument to leverage TFS as a repository for requirements, scenarios, test cases, functional and load testing as well as defect tracking. TFS is an excellent repository to s...

A little more than a month ago, I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Team System. I haven't said much about it because I try to remain a humble guy and frankly, I've been swamped with work/life. And, unlike a lot of awards, it's not really one you "go after"...it comes to you without a formula. What I really want to say about this is thank you. Thank you to the community for creating opportunities to present. Thank you to Microsoft for supporting technology professionals and creating jobs and careers around your products (and staying out of the way when I comes to implementation :). Thank you to the community leaders and professionals who dedicate their time and seemingly endless energy to making all of us stronger by creating environments of intense learning and camaraderie. Thank you to my employer for believing in my endeavors and investing in me the time to develop my TFS/VSTS skill set and share what I learn with the commun...

I'm sure I missed a step somewhere during setup but...so the search engines catch 'em, I'm going to post my TFS/VSTS 2010 setup missteps below: Issue : "TF255147: The following server that is running SQL Server is not listening on the expected TCP port: SERVER" Resolution : Open SQL Server Configuration Manager. Under SQL Server Network Configuration, Protocols for MSSQLSERVER, right-mouse Enable TCP/IP. Restart SQL Server. Re-run TFS configuration wizard. Issue : "TF255282: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cannot be installed. The program is already installed on this server" Resolution : Open up Add/Remove Programs (or "Programs and Features" under Win2k8 Server) and remove Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Re-run TFS configuration wizard. Issue : Couldn't get Full-Text search within SQL 2008 to install. MSI (s) (14:AC) [00:03:21:091]: Source is incorrect. Unable to open or validate MSI package D:\Setup\sql_engine_core_shared.msi.M...

Thanks for everyone attending my " Implementing an Agile Software Development Process with Team Foundation Server (TFS) " presentation today. We enjoyed some good discussion. I had a few TFS-related questions pop up which I thought I'd address in a post: Q. Is it possible to fail the build but only if a specific test fails? So, let's say we have 3 tests. If Test01 or Test02 fail, fail the build. If Test03 fails, don't fail the build. A. Not that I'm aware of. If any test fails in a build but compilation succeeded, that build lists a state of Partially Succeeded. With TFS 2008 SP1, we received a property to modify or control this behavior: TreatTestFailureAsBuildFailure. If true (false is the default), any test failure will set the build state to Failed (vs. Partially Succeeded). Nice write-up here . You might take the approach of creating two separate builds: one that contains all your tests and one containing just mission critical tests. Set TreatTestFailureA...

Rhut roe, Raggie. You just checked in a merge operation affecting 100's of files in TFS against the wrong branch. Ooops. Well, you can simply roll it back, right? Select the folder in Source Control Explorer and...hey, where's the Rollback? Rollback isn't supported in TFS natively. However, it is supported within the Power Tools leveraging the command-line TFPT.exe utility. It's fairly straightforward to revert back to a previous version--with one caveot. First, download and install the Team Foundation Power Tools 2008 on your workstation. Before proceeding, let's create a workspace dedicated to the rollback. To "true up" the workspace, the rollback operation will peform a Get Latest for every file in your current workspace. This can consume hours (and many GB) with a broad workspace mapping. To work around this, I create a temporary workspace targeted at just the area of source I need to roll back. So let's drill down on our scenario... I'm worki...

Occasionally, I encounter issues with the TFS data warehouse failing to refresh. Sometimes, it's as simple as the VS TFS Task Scheduler service isn't started but other times, it's more complicated. Here's a helpful troubleshooting document up on MSDN for troubleshooting the SQL Server TFSWarehouse relational table / Operational Data Store (ODS). If you're expereincing issues with Analysis Services (SSAS) and/or the cubes, reference this one .

Thanks to everyone attending my firm's monthly Microsoft BizValue Series. In case you missed it, I've presented recently on the Microsoft Business Intelligence ( MSBI ) stack, Microsoft Online Services / BPOS and Team Foundation Server ( TFS ). We meet in our offices downtown (Columbus, OH) on the 2nd Wednesday of the month. Next week (June 10th), I'll be delivering a talk on leveraging TFS for agile software development efforts. I'll deliver a similar presentation in our Charlotte, NC offices the following day (June 11th). You can learn more and register here and here .

I haven't installed a development tool (production or beta/CTP) on my core OS for years. I do all my development, presentation preparation and learning / experimentation on Virtual PC (VPC) instances. (Ok, my clients pony up development machines for client work but...and no developing / architect jokes) Also, these are not VPCs I created. Certainly, one needs to license these instances properly when used in a production environment (vs. testing/evaluation) but leveraging a VPC will save you loads of time and effort (and headaches). To be clear, I don't recommend this approach if you need to actually learn how to install and configure a product and/or operating system. If you're studying for your MCSE, it likely behooves you to actually install it a few times rather than leveraging an existing virtual instance. But, if you want to learn how to leverage or use the product rather than how to install and configure it , go out to your favorite search engine or search.microsoft....

This post includes a recent inquiry and my response. Thought it was interesting...names changed to protect the innocent. ============================= Jeff, I was one of the attendees at the Foo Bar seminar you put together earlier this month. I got a lot out of it and have been inspired to give it a try. I do not have an employer at the moment, nor any extra equipment lying around. I want to install and configure the whole mess on my laptop (dual-core processor, 2G RAM, Vista SP1 -- so it should handle it). I don't want to use the downloadable virtual image as I want to learn how to do the actual installation process. Hopefully this experience will help me in the future. (Or is this crazy and I should just stick with the virtual image?) I have copies of all the relevant software, and am looking for some advice on the best way to do the installation and configuration where the Team Server, SQL Server (I already have 2008 Express installed), and Team Sui...

Thanks to everyone who attended our ALM Briefing / SDLC in a Box event on 2/05 at the Polaris Microsoft offices. We had a great audience with lots of intriguing questions. Our follow-up post is here . Shameless plug: Cardinal Solutions , my employer and one of the sponsors of this event, is a Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Inner Circle partner. We specialize in: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Assessments / Catalyst Team Foundation Server (TFS) capacity planning, installation and configuration Migration of source code Process Template customization and advising End-user training for all roles Automated and Continuous Integration (CI) builds with Team Build Best practice advising and ongoing consulting for process change, methodology implementation and customization of process and tools surrounding TFS and VSTS Please contact me for all your Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) needs.

Compelling TFS Features to Upgrade from 2005 to 2008 Security Update for Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 Posted Streamline Team Projects With Process Templates

I'll be presenting VSTS/TFS 2008 at this two day event Feb. 4-5th. Speakers: Alexei Govorine , Quick Solutions Jeff Hunsaker , Cardinal Solutions They are the co-founders of the Central Ohio ALM Group The SDLC in a Box session will be led by two Central Ohio community leads. This 2 day briefing will discuss an application lifecycle project, from initial conception through requirements gathering, design, development, testing, build & review processes. We also cover process concepts, integration with non-Microsoft development and best-of-breed partner solutions & offerings for Visual Studio 2008 Team System. This two day sesions is targeted for Developers, Architects, Project Managers, DBAs and Business Analysts looking for ALM and researching Team Foundation Server. Register for this Event! Enter code: 857100 This event will be held at: Microsoft 8800 Lyra Drive Suite 400 Columbus, OH 43240 Map IT!

Buck Hodges just announced the release of TFS Branching Guidance II.