Effective Thoughts

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...)