Andru's WebLog

VM Prep Tool for Visual Studio Team Lab Management 2010

andresv — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:26:00 GMT

Microsoft has released the first version of the Virtual Machine Preparation Tool for Visual Studio Team Lab management 2010. What a mouthfull! Try saying that three times in a row..

Well, the tool function is to prepare existing VMs to be compatible with VS 2010 Lab Management requirements, and believe me, there are a few. Configuring an existing VM by hand is a tedious and VERY error prone task, and so this tool was born.

Download it from http://vslabmgmt.codeplex.com/, this version is prepared to work with VSTS 2010 Beta 2 and Windows Server 2008 X86 SP2 VMs. They will be adding more options as soon they finish testing of different versions (and flavors) of Windows. Perhaps R2 is on the pipeline?

Best regards,

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Build Silverlight 2.0 or 3.0 projects with an x64 TFS 2010 Build Agent

andresv — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I was trying to build our biggest solution after migration (TEST migration) and found that Silverlight projects won't compile. The first error we received was "The Silverlight 2 SDK is not installed". I found a post on the Silverlight forum about this and managed to fix the error, but then a second error appear:

"The "ValidateXaml" task failed unexpectedly ... System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'PresentationCore, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The given assembly name or codebase was invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131047)

According to the people in the Silverlight forum, this is a Silverlight BUG and it won't compile in an x64 environment, so the general workaround is to use an x86 Build Agent.

Fortunately, I found a MUCH BETTER workaround for TFS 2010, wich only involves changing the configuration of the build definition and set the "MSBuild Patform" to "X86" (it was "Auto" before).

After this, my Silverlight projects compile again, even in an x64 Build agent. Nice!

Just for reference, the Silverlight post is here: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/113956/256849.aspx

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Enabled new ALM features after migration of TFS2008 to TFS2010

andresv — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:48:00 GMT

The test migration of our TFS 2008 went extremely well (the import command processed nearly 7GB of data from our TFS 2008) in less than half hour, and all running in my notebook (not some kickass server...).

Today I executed the script published by Hakan Eskici to upgrate the process template from v4.2 to v5, by simply running a BET file. The process is very simple and fast, and after that we now have the updated process template with all the TFS 2010 goodies enabled.

Check out the process and download the script from http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2009/10/19/sample-script-to-enable-new-features-in-upgraded-team-projects-tfs-2010-beta2.aspx

After the upgrade I created a new TASK and found the new "Original estimate" field, and the now separated "Remaining work" and "Completed work", and I almost cryied by the emotion... :)

Also the BUGS have now the new "Repro Steps" and "Test Cases" tabs that are extremely welcome. There also more changes than this (for example the new Test Case WI) so give it a try!

Best regards,

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Step by step TFS 2010 configuration

andresv — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:27:00 GMT

Here I found a good post about how to setup TFS 2010 (and everything else).

http://juliocasal.com/archive/2009/11/02/team-foundation-server-2010-beta-2-office-sharepoint-server-2007-single-server-installation-part-1.aspx

TFS 2010 is easier to setup than previous versions, but I cannot say the same for Sharepoint...

Enjoy!

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

MOSS & TFS 2010: Insufficient rights when configuring SSO

andresv — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:53:00 GMT

If you try to configure the SSO (Single Sign-On) in Sharepoint 2007 for TFS 2010, you migh get the dreaded "Insufficient Rights" error.

Configuring the SSO for TFS is not THAT well documented, and you keep finding instructions like "Configure the propper applicaiton domain groups". What the heck that means?

Anyway, the first step is to configure the "Microsoft Single Sign On" service on EVERY Sharepoint frontend server. Change startup to AUTOMATIC, configure a DOMAIN account for that service, make it local administrator, add it to the local WSS_ADMIN_WPG group.

You can use the service account you used for running Sharepoint as it already has most of this configuration, or you can create a brand new account specially for the SSO service. If this Sharepoint server will be your new corporate server, probably want to choose the later.

And lastly, you you try to configure the SSO in the Sharepoint Central Administration and get the error "Insufficient Rights", make sure you are LOGGED IN with the account used for running the SSO service.

Hope that helps,

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

History of Visual Studio (by Rico Mariani)

andresv — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Only a genuine GEEK can enjoy reading the history of Visual Studio, but it was really fun (to me)!

Check it out at http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/tags/History+of+Visual+Studio/default.aspx

Enjoy!

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Authentication problems in Windows 2008 R2 and loopback IP

andresv — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:02:00 GMT

We are migrating part of our infrastructure to Windows Server 2008 R2, and while preparing a DEMO environment we got bitten by this problem. In R2 (and Windows 7) security is a little tigher and NTLM authentication will not work if the endpoint trying to access is using a loopback IP address (127.0.0.1). This holds true even if using an alias in the hosts file.

Some of the symthoms of this are getting soem error and audit events in the event log, for example: NTLM/Operational EventID 8001 and 8002 and LsaSrv EventID 6037.

The resolution of this issue (not recommended for production) would be to disable the new "LoopbackCheck" security feature for the LSA (Local Security Authority) service. To do that you need to alter the registry and add the key defined below.

For your convenience, you can copy & paste the text between the "==" and save it as a .reg file.

============================================================

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa]
"DisableLoopbackCheck"=dword:00000001

============================================================

Hope it helps someone.

Best regards,

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Problems migrating WebTest projects from VS2008 to VS2010

andresv — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:07:00 GMT

If you fall into the same problem I did (WebTests project not being converted to the new VS2010 format) I found a workaround.

I just removed the offending projects the then added back to the solution one by one. When loading each project VS ask me to convert them, and that works without problem. After closing and reopening the solution the WebTest projects load without any issue.

Anyway, I will try to find out what really happened here. I let you know if found anything.

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Projects upgraded from VS2008 to VS2010

andresv — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:32:00 GMT

Yesterday I did my first test migrating one of our our rather complex VS2008 solutions to VS2010 (and TFS 2010). The solution and projects upgrade went generally well, I only had a few minor things to fix I'm detailing below:

All WCF client proxies were automatically regenerated. This is not neccesarily bad but we had touched our generated code (for example, to add a #pragma warning disable 1591 to avoid failing compilation because of the missing XML comments). To solve this I only needed to undo the changes produced in the generated files and everything worked as usual.
The new VS and/or compiler seems to be more strict in some things. Compilation failed because it found a couple malformed XML configuration files, a a couple conflicts about references (projects referencing directly and indirectly different versions of the same component). Fixing those errors was easy and I'm happy to find them automatically in VS2010.
I had to uninstall WIX 3 and install the (experimental) WIX 3.5 with Votive support for VS2010. Wix projects didn't compiled at first so I had to manually edit the .wixproj file and change the tool path. Also the new WIX 3.5 has a known bug where some of the project variables have the wrong value (for example, var.project.ProjectDir now includes a trainling "/bin" that is clearly wrong). A quick fix is to include a "/.." in the source path to reference the root project folder, but this is probably going to need rolling back this hack after the bug is fixed.
Some projects didn't upgraded automatically (WebTests, for example) and I had to migrate them manually. I'm investigating a issue with this projects because VS2010 seems to prompt me to migrate the same projects EVERY time I open the solution.
Tests projects (Unit tests, for example) are migrated to Framework 4.0 automatically. Those projects cannot run or compile using a previous version of the CLR and therefore ALL its references need to be compiled for Framework 4.0 as well.

Well, that's all for now... I'm going to test some build scripts now... wish me luck!

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

TFS 2010 Upgrade options

andresv — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:57:00 GMT

For those planning to upgrade from TFS 2008 (as we do) Bryan Krieger posted a nice article commenting the options and a high level overview of the process.

Check it out at http://blogs.msdn.com/bkrieger/archive/2009/10/21/team-foundation-server-2010-upgrade.aspx

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Retina.NET support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008

andresv — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:39:00 GMT

The latest version of Retina.NETm the open source ORM published on CodePlex has now explicit support for MS SQL 2008. The new DataStore now supports the new data types (DATETIME2, TIME, DATE, DATETIMEOFFSET) and the new FILESTREAM access modifier for BLOBs columns.

Check it out at http://retina.codeplex.com and download the latests binaries or sources.

Andrés G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

White paper: understanding WCF extensibility

andresv — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:33:00 GMT

I have written a white paper on WCF extensibility and I would like to share it with the community so I have attached a copy to this post in Word 2003 format.

Enjoy!

Andrés G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

Faster builds with VSTS Team Build

andresv — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:46:00 GMT

If you have big solutions with hundreds of projects and hundred of thoudsands lines of code, you know that by default compiling in the build server takes some time. One of the things that take most time is getting the sources to compile, and that's because by default the build script performs a FULL GET instead of a "normal" get (or incremental, just getting the things that changed from the last build).

In order to instruct the build agent to perform an incremental for VS2005 get you need to modify the build script and include the following:

<PropertyGroup Condition="Exists($(SolutionRoot))">
<SkipClean>true</SkipClean>
<SkipInitializeWorkspace>true</SkipInitializeWorkspace>
<ForceGet>false</ForceGet>
</PropertyGroup>

For VS2008 you only need to add the following:

· </ItemGroup>· <PropertyGroup>· <IncrementalBuild>true</IncrementalBuild>· · </PropertyGroup>· </Project>

This means that the build script should not delete or initialize a previously existing workspace and don't try to force the GET operation for ALL sources. Another thing we can do to speedup the build process (specially in CI builds) is to avoid associating WorkItems with each build (that is only done on the RELEASE build done manually by the release manager), and therefore we need to include the following in the build script:

</PropertyGroup>

Hope you find this information useful,

Andres G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

http://www.vmbc.com

Continuous Integration presentation at Microsoft

andresv — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:33:00 GMT

A few days ago I presented the topic "Continuous Integration" to part of the Architect community in Argentina.

The presentation was about how to achieve higher quality software by using Microsoft tools (VSTS, Sharepoint, Office, and more) and how our team solved some of the most common issues in software development projects by defining and fine tuning methodologies, processes, tools and mindset.

I try to be practical and talk and show HOW do we do things, rather than giving long theorical explanations about the topic. Of course the topics touched diverse points of interest like requirements approval process for external & internal clients, formal registration & audit of approval proof, publication of metrics and project status to internal & external clients, ALM processes for heterogeneus platforms, and much (MUCH) more.

I really enjoyed giving this talk and the audience was really active and interested in our experience, they asked a lot of very good questions and It was a real pleasure to interact with them and discuss such challenging topics with bright people.

Juan Ladetto, a Software Architect from Microsoft Argentina coordinating this Architect Community activities, has posted about this presentation and if interested you can download the PPT from there:

http://blogs.msdn.com/juanl/archive/2009/10/16/resumen-desayuno-nlost.aspx

Juan, thanks again for the opportunity and hope it hapens again!

Best regards,

Andrés G Vettori, VMBC, CTO

http://www.vmbc.com

Free (very good & useful) Telerik tools for TFS

andresv — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:23:00 GMT

Telerik has just released two new tools for TFS: Workitem Manager and Project Dashboard.

Here is the download link: http://www.telerik.com/products/tfsmanager-and-tfsdashboard.aspx

Check it out! We are using it and they are excellent. Hope they make this project a community one so we can continue to evolve and improve this excellent piece of software.

Best regards,

Andrés G Vettori, CTO, VMBC