.Net Jonesie

Installing .Net Service Bus on 2003 or XP

Peter — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:49:59 GMT

The July CTP of the .Net Services SDK only support 2008, Vista or Windows 7. This is true of the previous CTP’s but it was not enforced until the latest release. Luckily for me there is a simple workaround.

On a machine that does have the July CTP installed, take a look in C:\Program Files\Microsoft .NET Services SDK (July 2009 CTP)\Assemblies. There is a tool in here called RelayConfigurationInstaller.exe. Copy this and the Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll to your target machine and run the exe with /i. Then copy the DLL to the GAC and your done.

It appears as though RelayConfigurationInstaller simply adds the required machine.config settings on the target machine. You could also do this manually if required.

Of course, this is not officially supported but MSFT are listening. If you really need legacy OS support for this then post a message to the forums and ask for it before it’s too late.

Full Credit to Clemens Vasters for this tip.

I’ve given in and started to tweet

Peter — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:39:01 GMT

Having a blog is like having a nagging wife – not blogging makes me feel guilty. The thing is, I just don’t have the time to to write the type of blog posts I like to write – long and accurate. Not that I’m ever very accurate, but well …

Anyways, I’ve been ranting about how stupid twitter is and what a complete time waster it is without actually trying it. Then it occurred to me that twitter might actually be a useful alternative to long exhaustive blog posts.

So, I’ve signed up again and am tweeting a little about very development focused things. You wont catch me tweeting about the weather or Michael Jackson etc. Currently I’m into Azure dev so I’m finding lots of little things to chirp about. I haven’t found a lot of tweets to follow yet apart from the obvious candidates – scottgu etc – but I did get my first reply today when I sent a message to a Microsoft tweet. Very sweet!

Follow me if you love me :) jonesienz

Azure .Net Service Bus & Required permissions cannot be acquired

Peter — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:46:01 GMT

I’ve been doing quite a bit of fun work with Azure lately – and it’s great! – mostly :) It’s early days yet and there are a couple of (hundred?) things to sort out before they go live I guess. The main problem with anything new like this is the lack of documentation and real world expertise when you strike a problem. So, I thought I should blog solutions to the problems we have struck lately. Here’s a little one.

The .Net Service Bus allows you to expose in-house systems to the wide wide web without all that pesky firewall configuration. Essentially, it sites between the client and server and routes (WCF) messages. You can read all about it here. It only took us a morning to figure out how to configure our WCF’s but we had problems when it came time to deploy the web-role client to Azure.

Required permissions cannot be acquired.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Security.Policy.PolicyException: Required permissions cannot be acquired.

So, after some research, the solution was very simple. You just need to allow full trust for the web role which is achieved by setting the web role’s enableNativeCodeExecution to true in the ServiceDefinition.csdef file. See here for the full story.

MSDN On Speed

Peter — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:08:41 GMT

MSDN are testing a new version of the Library pages that are designed for low bandwidth connections. If you browse to any library page you will see a link under the breadcrumb, e.g:

This will display a vastly stripped down version of the usual pages.

You will be returned to normal mode if you navigate to any other library page or use the persist option at the top right of the page.

The speed of MSDN in this mode is great. The only thing I miss is search.

Enjoy!

My Name in Lights

Peter — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:49:09 GMT

Recently I wrote an article for http://devshaped.com. This was a lot of fun. So much so that I want to do more!

Visual Studio 2010 Drops WIX :(

Peter — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:56:27 GMT

I haven't used WIX a lot so I'm no expert, but I do know that is way better packaging solution than anything else that ships with Visual Studio currently. Version 3 of WIX had progressed to the point that MS were helping to have it included in the VS 2010 out of the box. Which is slightly ironic if you know the history of WIX.

However, it appears than plans and people have changed and WIX will NOT ship with VS2010.

This is very sad for us poor developers who are left with little out of box choices for solution packaging. Sure you will still be able to get WIX yourself but many shops don't like to let developers help themselves to open source tools and are even meaner when it comes to paying for tools. Inclusion of WIX with the VS2010 release would have moved WIX to the mainstream and finally put a nail in the coffin of VDPROJ packages.

For the full story, read here.

If you think this is a mistake then it may not be too late. Microsoft always listen to customers. If enough of us talk about this and express opinions then they may change their mind or at least offer WIX as a Power Tools or some such thing.

If you would like to have your say then either blog about this yourself or send an email to Soma (VP of Developer Division) via his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/contact.aspx

Bye Bye MVP

Peter — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:30:51 GMT

It's been a fantastic time being an MVP for the last 6 years. I've really enjoyed being involved in the community and doing what I can to spread the good work that Microsoft do. However, all good things come to an end. I've had a year off presenting and organising to concentrate on personal projects so have not been re-awarded this year.

I'm going to miss the comradeship of the fellow MVP's and the occasional 'secret' that we got to hear. No doubt I will lose my sanity again before too long and get involved in some community activities. I'll be back :)

Recession Conspiracy Theory

Peter — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:22:31 GMT

Here's my grand conspiracy theory. It's 2007 and you realise that your puppet Bush & co is not going to be in office forever and that wars eventually end. Your next pet President is a has-been who is unlikley to get power. Your oil producing, weapons manufacturing empire is under threat. What do you do?

Well, how about an old fashioned recession? Its worked in the past, right? You can make a few quick billion on the stock market and use that to invest in the bargains that will follow the crash. Rattle a few cages and the price of oil will go up. Make sure your President pardons a few friends and free's up some land for development before he goes. Then make a bit of a mess for the next do-gooder President to keep him busy enough so that he leaves you alone for a while.

Hey, this would make a great board game! Call it Global Domination or Get Richer Quicker. It could work like Monopoly, except you would start with 400 hotels and $12 Billion. The idea would be to steal as much money off the other players as you can by manipulating politicians and the media, buying up the hotels and killing off the employees.

It's very hard not to be cynical but I believe that the current global financial crisis has largely bypassed New Zealand - or it may just be that the IT industry is more sheltered from it than other industries.

I have plenty of work. I'm not worried about being laid-off any time soon. My employer is doing pretty well this year. Other IT companies I know have plenty of work. There are still lots of jobs available in IT. Basically, everything is pretty much the same as it always is.

The main difference I can see is that people are slower at paying bills and the news media are constantly reminding us of the doom and gloom.

Recessions are great for some people. There is a lot of money to be made for those that are prepared and there is no better way to be ready for a recession than to start one yourself! I have no doubt that this has been created for the benefit of a few individuals and companies. Fortunately, New Zealand is small enough to be ignored most of the time.

SharePoint Themes

Peter — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:06:15 GMT

If you are into styling SharePoint - and who isn't! - then you might find these useful: Ten Themes for SharePoint is VSeWSS Projects. I think there is a yellow one in there ... :)

MVC Release Candidaite 1 - an issue for me

Peter — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:42:02 GMT

Microsoft have release ASP.Net MVC RC 1 last week - twice. The first release was quickly refreshed to fix some issues so if you downloaded early last week, you may need to get the download again. Check here.

I have had a quick attempt to upgrade my 1 project and it all worked pretty sweetly and the upgrade process was very SIMPLE.

However. Several of my crud views use FckEditor for long text fields. A post-pack of these views triggers page validation:

A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client

Normally, turing off page request validation in the page and / or web.config will fix this :

< pages validateRequest="false">>

but for me and others (see comments at Phil Haack link above) this does not help.

So, looks like I will be rolling back to the beta until this is resolved.

Update:

RTFB! http://haacked.com/archive/2009/02/07/take-charge-of-your-security.aspx. I haven't tried this yet, but it is almost certainly the solution.

New Web Platform Installer

Peter — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:12:23 GMT

Reading Paul a post on Hacked.com I saw mention of a new thing - the Web Platform Installer. This is a nifty tool that can be used to install the .Net Framework, ASP.Net, Visual Web Developer, ASP.MVC, Silverlight tools and other bits and peices. All from one very convienient and SIMPLE interface.

Using Virtual Machines for development these days I am often setting up new machines. This will save me a bit of time there. It's also great for helping friends and noobs get started with web development and will reduce the amount of time I spend on emails and awkward phone calls.

Well done Microsoft!

End of an era - so long Rod

Peter — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:19:54 GMT

It's sad but understandable that Rod has decided to through in the blogging towel. While I haven't been following a lot of bloggers lately, Rod's posts were always insightful and often inspiring and I always tried to keep up to date with his feed. You will be missed Rod - which seems impossible now that I say it.

MVC DropDownList and blank options

Peter — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:34:24 GMT

I'm loving MVC. In fact, it is my new love. SharePoint is out - that was a bad relationship anyway - too sadistic.

There are however, a few things in the current beta that require a workaround or two. Here's one.

To create a dropdown list in MVC you use the HtmlHelper thus:

<%= Html.DropDownList("CityID") %>

then in your controller you add the following before calling the view:

ViewData["CityID"] = new SelectList(from c
in someDataContext.Cities orderby c.Name select c, 


"CityID","Name", selectedCityID);

where selectedCityID is the item you want preselected in the list. Note that the ViewData key and the control name all match. And this just works. Easy as cake.

But now, suppose you want an option at the top of the list such as "[select a city]" when you are adding new records. Again, this is a peice of pie, just do this :

<%= Html.DropDownList("[select a city]",
"CityID") %>

The dropdown list will now contain this extra option at the top of the list of city, and it's value will be blank.

BUT.. the specified selectedvalue of selectedCityID will not be selected any more. If you look a the page source generated by the HtmlHelper you will see that none of the options has selected=selected.

I dont know if this is a bug and/or if it will be fixed by the release candidate (due any day) but as a workaround I have used the following jQuery code to pre-select the default option:

$(function() {

  $("select[@name='CityID'] option[@value='<%=
ViewData.Model.CityID%>']").attr('selected', 'selected');

});

Hope this helps someone else :)

Script Tag Madness - Blank Pages

Peter — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 03:57:44 GMT

I've been writing a small app using the latest ASP.Net MVC Beta and JQuery - for fun and for work - and got caught out by a problem I'm sure Ive had before.

When ever you have a script tag dont self close it like this:

For me this would stop all subsequent scripts from executing and sometimes result in a completly blank page. I had the same result in Firefox and IE 7. Instead, allways have a seperate end tag:>

Happy New Year :)

htmlFile: Access Denied - A Defence for Murder?

Peter — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:19:21 GMT

I've been tasked with cleaning up a few remaining bugs in a system that is about to go live. I spent most of last week trying to figure out this one.

A page in a site included an asp:FileUpload control. This was working fine but then suddenly stopped. When the user submitted the form the FileUpload control would be cleared and nothing happened - no postback, no file uploaded, nothing. Ah, but only in IE 7 (we didn't have 6 to test with), FireFox works fine.

So, to cut a very long story short and to save anyone else from murderous thoughts, here is the reason and solution (at least for me).

After turning on script debugging I could see an exception on the ASP.Net postback event:

function __doPostBack(eventTarget, eventArgument) {
if (!theForm.onsubmit || (theForm.onsubmit() != false)) {
theForm.__EVENTTARGET.value = eventTarget;
theForm.__EVENTARGUMENT.value = eventArgument;
theForm.submit();
}
}

The message displayed was htmlFile: Access Denied.

After much googling I found a few forum threads (heres one) that indicated that this was a security feature introduced in XP SP2, the idea, I think, was to prevent files being uploaded without the user knowing about it. Unfortuately none of the suggested solutions apply or work for me.

After winding back the source day by day to a version that worked I was able to determine that the inclusion of an onload event handler in the body tag of the page was the cause. Removing this fix the problem immediately.

Conslusion? Well, I think IE is thinking that the onload event handler could be doing something dodgey so it enters a hightened state of alert and locks out the upload control.

Parting Shot: Why the frac is this behaviour not documented by Microsoft and the IE team? Maybe it is and google can't find it... but I doubt that.

Heopfully you wont waste 3 days like I did trying to solve this.

Sydney Bound

Peter — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:24:00 GMT

Tommorow I leave Christchurch for (up to) 6 months work in Sydney. I'll be working for Intergen Solutions Pty - the Oz version of Intergen NZ - on an EPiServer web site for one of our customers, but I'll be back in NZ as required, probably monthly.

I'm really looking forward to:

doing some coding again - seems like I have not done any real coding for a year but I'm sure that's not strictly correct
decent weather - winter has been long and cold and as I get older I enjoy it less and less
the Sydney lifestyle - beaches, booze and babes :) (hope the wife isn't reading this!)
getting involved with the Sydney .Net community. I'm already booked to do the Office Dev Con and to see Steve Balmer at some MS event.
doing stuff that is worthy of blogging again

but I worry about:

the heat - it was 31c there on Monday - that's about my limit. It will take me a few weeks to get used to that again
the cost - finding accommodation is hard, finding cheap accommodation is very hard. Plus, my 20yo daughter will be joining me in a few weeks for the summer so I need 2 bedrooms. If you happen to have or know of a 2 bed furnished unit in Sydney that is available soon then please drop me a line!
homesickness. I normally enjoy the first 3 days in a big city and then want to be back in my own bed. Being away from the family for up to a month at a time will be a challenge for everyone.

And I'll be missing Code Camp :( which sounds like it is going to be a great event.

CodeCamp is Coming!

Peter — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:08:20 GMT

Mainland Code Camp 2008 - Keeping It Real

Another Code Camp is being organised for Christchurch (see details below). I'm taking a back seat this year with the organisation but I will be presenting a session or two. I'm thinking:

100% Pure Javascript - All script and no controls

This session will demonstrate how to create a rich client application using javascript that uses an ASP.Net application for server side functionality - without using any (or at least very few) ASP.Net server controls. I guess you could call this hand-crafted AJAX.

Whats it all about, TFS?

Team System and Team Foundation Server are not particularly well understood. In this short session I will attempt to explain (and possibly demonstrate) how the features of Team System impact & benefit developers and the project life cycle on a day to day basis.

Date: Saturday 1st November, Christchurch. 9am - 6pm
Location: Trimble Navigation, 11 Birmingham Drive (map)
Cost: Free! (Lunch provided)

Theme: Keeping It Real
The sessions are designed to showcase .NET related tools and techniques that will be useful to you as a developer, focusing on real-world topics that will be of immediate use.

Featuring mostly local presenters it's a time to talk and socialise and connect with others in the local community. An optional dinner in the evening is an ideal way to finish the day (the great restaurant last year is still being talked about!)

Speakers: Looking at getting into speaking? Email christchurch@dot.net.nz to register your interest. It's a great opportunity to give a talk on anything .NET related. We have plenty of options

5mins (Lightning) - Powerpoint only (no live code). Aim at getting a single point across - demonstrating a product, feature, tip, technique etc. These sessions are a hit with audiences at other DNUG groups and code camps - fun and lightweight!
15mins (Thunder) - Enough time to show a single concept or demo without getting into too much detail. eg Interesting practical code, fun side projects, favourite dev tool/trick , LINQ to XML example etc
30mins, 60mins - Useful for when you have something larger to demonstrate or feel really passionate about and need to spread the word!

Contact Details: If you have any questions, suggestions or want to offer sponsorship, please contact us at christchurch@dot.net.nz.

Chchchchanges, new stuff and upcoming things

Peter — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:22:27 GMT

It's been a while since I've blogged about anything interesting - or had anything very interesting to blog about - so this is a bit of proof that I'm still alive and a catchup of what I've been up to.

iPhone
I succumed to the hype and was sucked into buying a new 3gesus phone. This was also prompted by my realisation that my iMate SP5 was actually a peice of fecal matter. iPhone rocks! The UI is fantastic and so easy to use. I was worried when it arrived without any sort of manual - a slim pamplet is all you get. However a manual is unnecessary.

There's been some negative comments from people about drop-outs and slowness, but I haven't had any problems that I didn't cause myself. The latest 2.1 OS patch has made the phone faster and the battery life does seem a tad better. I did use the jailbreaking WinPwn on the phone pre-2.1 but this made the phone very slow and I really can't seen the point of doing this unless you really need to hack it to death.

My only complaint is Safari - it locks the phone and crashes very easily. However, I dont really use it much so this is no biggy.

Windows Server 2008
I updated my dev desktop to 2008 server x64 without much forethought or planning. The upgrade painless but I've spent a lot of time getting all my VM's converted to HyperV. Its faster then 2003 server and it seems more stable, but this might be more to do with 64bits and a cleanup of installed rubbish than anything else.

HyperV is great. It's certainly a step up from Virtual Server. Snapshots are a life saver! I've been doing some work with Active Directory schemas so it's a peice of cake to make a change then roll back to a previous snapshot and try again.

Like all good Microsoft software there are a number of really annoying little quirks, missing features and unwelcome changes: The HyperV VM Connection console doesn't do clipboard across machine so you still need RDP, which impossible if you only use the internal network connection. The event viewer now has 4 hundredd thousand gazillion different nodes - finding a simple error in an event log can take a long time. UAC still sucks and is unnecessary for anyone with an IQ above 12.

Chrome
For a version < 1 browser Chrome is excellent. I use it in preference to FireFox which I use in preference to IEeeek (any version). It's very fast, work on just about everything and has the typically clean Google UI. Like Firefox though it's not the best for Windows authentication - IE still works better there.

EPiServer
EpiServer have released a new CTP of version 5.2. It's hard to find exact details on what is included in this release but it does support Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .Net 3.5. The new Installation Manager is way better than EPiServer manager.

SharePoint & PowerShell
Most of my time is spent diddling around with SharePoint. Most recently I've been heen helping out on a large MOSS project with a few small PowerShell scripts. The entire MOSS site and migration of content from a SharePoint 1 site is scripted with PowerShell. This has shaved months off the development time.

Code Camp
It's coming soon! Stay tuned...

Holidays
Spring is hear at last - on and off - which is great cause I've had the winter from the cold part of hell. We are packing up the kids and taking 2 week in Sydney and Queensland from next week. Can't wait - and I may not come back until after the election!

A brief history of me

Peter — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:29:08 GMT

Thanks Matt. I cringed when I first saw this, but it’s actually quite challenging remembering the past in any detail.

How old were you when you started programming?

My first computer was a ZX80 but I didn’t do much with it. In fact, I think it turned me off computers for a while. The first real programming I did was at high school in the 6th form. Burnside didn’t have any computers in 1980-ish so we used to cycle to the university and submit our coding sheets or collect the punch cards and ‘run’ our Fortran 77 app’s on the PDP.

Later we discovered the DEC VDU’s where we could spend 30 minutes entering the code directly and see the results on the line printers. I don’t know if it was the ozone or the clacking sound but I really miss using line printers as a terminal – they also had keyboards! There is something very satisfying about mechanical interactions with a computer.

How did you get started in programming?

I had a friend at Christs College and being a private school they could afford lots of cool stuff. They had a small PDP. Alex created some pretty nifty graphical applications on the this. After I left school he introduced me to PC’s and it wasn’t long after that I had my own – 8086, 4.77 Mghz, green screen, 256K RAM I think and twin floppies! – no HDD.

What was your first language?

Microsoft Basic Compiler – BASCOM – v 6 I think. I created some large applications with that but gee, it was slow. Before that I tried to learn COBOL via correspondence school. That was like learning to drive without a car so I can’t really count that.

I guess the first real language I used was C which I learnt at Christchurch Poly night classes. I soon realised it wasn’t for me though and discovered dBase and then Clipper. Clipper is/was a dBase compiler (pcode only) and if you don’t know what dBase is then think Access for DOS.

What was the first real program you wrote?

With Clipper I created my first applications that I actually got paid for. It was a system for managing club memberships. I formed a partnership with a friend of a friend and we sold about 20 of those I think mostly to Working Men’s clubs.

The last of my Clipper apps was only decommissioned about a year ago – 15 years from a DOS application is pretty good I think.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Fortran, MS Basic, C, dBase, Clipper, Pascal, VB, Forte (4GL), Delphi, C#, VB.Net, Java, JavaScript, English, Geek and a little Klingon.

What was your first professional programming gig?

My first real programming job was with a very small 1 product company. The product recorded output from telephone systems and calculated usage and cost. It was called CAPP Plus (CAPP, the original was written in Turbo Pascal and became unmaintainable – for various technical and personal reasons! I re-wrote it with Clipper). It was through this job I met my wife and when the company karked we took over the product and sold it for a few more years until Telecom decided to get out of the business.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

When I was young I always said I had no regrets and while that’s still true – give or take a few stupid ideas that I shouldn’t have acted on! - I just wish I’d started sooner. In the famous words of Oscar Wilde - ‘youth is wasted on the young’.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

If you love it, programming is easy, it’s humans that are hard. Spend as much time learning the business as you do learning your craft. Developers are easier to find than developers with real business knowledge. If you don’t understand the business then software bombs are also a good way to get promotions – or legal trouble.

What's the most fun you've ever had... programming?

I get a big kick hearing that an application you wrote years earlier is still being used every day and you never hear a word from the customer, but the best thing about this career is the opportunity to work with great people and maybe even marry them :)

I Choose

Hmmmm. The people I choose either don’t have a blog or their site is not working. I’ll try to update later…

Another TFS Upgrade - this time with feeling

Peter — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:26:59 GMT

I'm on a client site this week upgrading TFS 05 to TFS 08 and unlike my previous installation, this one has not been quite as smooth.

Server Setup

A brand new shiny server was proived for the update (dual quad core with 4Gb of ram). Initially we had tried to install on another similar server that had some other software on it for their helpdesk. Unfortunately, the install of TFS 05 or WSS 2 or both screwed this software and we had to restore the server and leave it alone. Not good!

Lessons learnt

1) don't expect any useful support from Symantec - Support guy: "Sorry but that is not one of our products", Me: "Ahhh, but I downloaded a trial version from your web site!".

2) don't install TFS (05) onto a server running anything that uses SQL Reporting or the default web site or WSS (2 or 3). I fact, it's way simpler to have a clean server.

Moving

I neglected to check that TFS SP1 was installed on the old server before configuring the new server with SP1 so I had to update the old server then redo the backups. No biggy, but it meant sitting arond for an hour.

Then the fit hit the shan. After 3 hours trying to figure out why the restorative move process was giving me stupid TFS errors I realised the TFS 05 installation media I was using was for the Workgroup edition. Dur! Luckily, it was a simple matter of removing WSS2 and TFS 05 then running through the process again (for the 4th time) with the correct installation.

At the end of this everything was working apart from SQL Reports - which I ignored as it was late in the day.

I then upgraded TFS 05 to TFS 08 which tool another hour, tested and I was done!

Lessons learnt

1) Make sure the source and target TFS installations are patched to the same levels. Same goes for WSS.

2) Make sure the installation media is the correct version/edition!

3) Create and save the DB restore scripts the first time you do it - it gets borng very quickly having to redo the restore 4 times using the SQL Management Studio GUI.

SharePoint

Thanks to a useful blog post I felt a lot more comfortable about attempting a SharePoint upgrade. The customer had not done any customisations to the project portal site so the prescan ran without issue and the upgrade comlpeted without errors.

Lessions learnt

1) An inplace upgrade is ok if the prescan is completely clean and you have experts available to help (or google).

Other Tips

I had made a binder with all the documentation I needed, including the Move instructions from MSDN, the TFS P&P Guide (all 500 pages), the licensing white paper, my upgrade plan - including the steps, servers, logins and other site relevant information - and a DVD with the software I needed in case the client could not find something (next time I'll check the DVD works tough as the TFS 08 iso was corrupt - thankfully the client had this). I'll leave this binder with the client as a parting gift :)

I'm not quite done yet, I still need to configure some build scripts.. will update this post later.

Vodafone iPhone Suckage

Peter — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:33:02 GMT

As usual, we get ripped. http://www.stuff.co.nz/4610626a28.html

Will someone please do something about corporate greed/crime in New Zealand?

My advice, if you really want one of the new iPhone, buy it overseas and hack it to work here – don’t give your money to Vodafone. Better yet – leave New Zealand.

New Marketing Strategy - Oximoranics

Peter — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:32:52 GMT

Is it just me, or does anyone else find themselves driven to buy funny stuff?

My TFS 2008 Upgrade

Peter — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 07:57:12 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded our Team Foundation Server from 2005 to 2008. This is my story…

I was very nervous about upgrading the server as the installation procedure requires un-installation of the existing TFS2005 version and an install of TFS 2008 over the top. The source code and work items are very important asset for us and loosing them, even for a day, would cost us a lot of money (and be somewhat embarrassing). So, I was very careful about the process.

Preparation

I needed to ensure that I could recover our current TFS installation should the upgrade go pair-shape so I created a Virtual Server image on our main domain with a clean install of TFS 2005. I then restored the TFS setup to this new server, which had a new name. Microsoft provide detailed instructions on how to move a TFS install here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404860(VS.80).aspx. This process also taught me how to do a disaster recovery – a very useful and necessary skill!

The creation of the VM, getting it on the domain, installing TFS, migrating the databases and reconfiguring the server took me the best part of 3 days. I took my time and followed the instructions precisely. If I had to do this again it don’t think it would take more than a day.

I also migrated the SharePoint content to the new server. This is documented in the above MSDN article.

I tested this new install, and while it was slow, it all worked and developers could connect and do work.

The testing highlighted a couple of issues. I had installed Conchango’s Scrum Template on TFS but it was not being used so I had uninstalled it. Unfortunately it had made some changes to the TfsWarehouse database that did not get removed during uninstall. The test scrum projects were deleted but I didn’t want to futz with the database directly so the scrum stuff had to stay.

Doing it for real

After all the preparation, the upgrade process was somewhat anti-climatic. It took an hour and half to uninstall TFS 05 and install TFS 08. Again, the instructions provided my Microsoft are precise and simple to follow.

I next updated Team Build and Web Access with the latest versions, Again, this was very simple and painless.

Problems

On the Monday morning following the upgrade I found that the Warehouse cube was not being updated. In fact, some of the dimensions were empty. It turned out there was a permissions issue with the analysis services. The error in the event log was :

Some or all identity references could not be translated.

A bit of Googling around quickly solved that one: http://blog.salvoz.com/2008/01/26/TFSWarehouseIssues.aspx

During my test run I had a lot of trouble with the SharePoint Services upgrade. As we don’t use the project portals very much. I made the decision to stick with WSS2 for now. Next time one of our SharePoint config guru’s is in town I may get it updated, or we might just switch to using the corporate MOSS platform.

I’ve now also notices that some Team Builds are failing. It appears that projects using our custom Work Items are having a problem building. I haven’t had time to investigate this yet, but I don’t expect it will be too hard to solve.

Recommendations

If you need to do any work with TFS read the MSDN documentation first – it’s exhaustive and complete. For any issues or problems Google first then post a message on the MSDN TFS forums – you will almost always get a quick answer from a Microsoft expert, MVP or other similarly brainy person.

Put your hand up if you can afford to lose all your source code – for even a day. Hmmm, I thought so. Create a disaster recovery plan and test it. Yet again, Microsoft provide all the documentation you need for this on MSDN, but here’s what I did:

Create a VM with Windows Server installed on it.
Add the server to the same domain as your current TFS install.
Install TFS and all the same bits you have on your production system.
Backup the VM.
Now test the DS plan on the VM using the move instructions from MSDN (above).
If you update your production server then remember to update and test the DS system again. In fact, test the DS system regularly - once a year or more often.

In summary I found the upgrade a very pleasant experience, aided greatly by the detailed and copious documentation from the tireless TFS team at Microsoft and the large volume of community blogs and forums.