Marcel de Vries, MVP Team System

How to make VSTS DBPro work with the default database collation

marcelv — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:59:38 GMT

today, I had a few hours of frustration, getting all databases in our project use the same collation.

What I wanted to achieve is that we would use the default collation of Latin1_General_CI_AS but not script that in our SQL scripts.

To start, for some reason the DBPro team decided not to use the names we are used to when we are working with collations. The list we all know (and love ahum ..) doe not show any relationship with the names used for the model collation. So first you need to figure out that English(United States) (1033) – CS, means Latin1_General_CS_AS .

As you might know the default collation for SQL 2008 default installation on an US English machine is Latin1_General_CI_AS, so that does not match by default. So I started to change this setting in all our database projects.

Then I wanted to set the scripts not to contain the collation in the scripts. To do this you can go to the deploy Tab and then click the Deployment Configuration file Edit button.

There you will get the following settings page with the dropdown where you can select the “deployment collation default” for your DBPro project.

Now we get to the fun part, because when you select the option “Do not script the collation” and you hit the deploy button I constantly got the message:

Warning TSD00258: The project and target databases have different collation settings. Deployment errors might occur.

Now that is interesting, I know my database is the default collation, I set the project to use English(United States) (1033), so why do I get this message?!?

So after some searching I found yet another location where you can set the collation and that is in the Catalog properties file on the first properties page. So I selected the option edit and got the following page:

Ok so I see, the collation is here CS and a SQL collation, so I changed that one also to Latin1_General_CI_AS.

So now I should be good right?

Well no, no luck. It just seems there is no way to get rid of the message telling me I have a different collation then the target database.

At this moment I am just stumped and do some additional inquiries why this is the case. The only way for now to make it work for me without warnings during build, is to set the “deployment collation default” back to “Use the collation of my project”.

It seems like a bug at this moment that I get this warning, but once I know for sure, i will post the update here.

Cheers,

Marcel

Silverlight error messages can be very cryptic or even inappropriate sometimes

marcelv — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:26:00 GMT

The past few days I have been working on a simple proof of concept where we want to replace some of the dashboards we have that where build in Flex/Flash with Silverlight 3 controls.

The reason to switch has most to do with the fact we can maintain all our codebase with one single technology instead of having many different technologies. The proof of concept just needs to show we can get the same functionality and have better development and debugging experience then we have today.

So during some work I did, I needed to just call an existing web service that already has an crossdomain.xml file deployed on the website. Now it happens to be that this web service is part of our SharePoint portal. Once I created the proxy by just adding a web reference, I created the simple code to call the service and wait for the data to get back:

DisplayNames.DisplayNameSoapClient client = new BuildStats.DisplayNames.DisplayNameSoapClient();
client.GetViewDataCompleted+=new EventHandler<BuildStats.DisplayNames.GetViewDataCompletedEventArgs>(client_GetViewDataCompleted);
client.GetViewDataAsync("Budget (Earned Value)","Highlight");

As you can see very simple code. Now when I tried to get this code to work, I constantly got the same exception message time and time again, and I just could not understand what was going wrong.

The message I got was the following:(XXXX is the name of the server I just left out)

An error occurred while trying to make a request to URI 'http://xxxxxx/sites/endstp/dev/_vti_bin/DisplayName.asmx'. This could be due to attempting to access a service in a cross-domain way without a proper cross-domain policy in place, or a policy that is unsuitable for SOAP services. You may need to contact the owner of the service to publish a cross-domain policy file and to ensure it allows SOAP-related HTTP headers to be sent. This error may also be caused by using internal types in the web service proxy without using the InternalsVisibleToAttribute attribute. Please see the inner exception for more details.

It took me a very long time to get my head around what was happening here, since I used the same service as the flex control was using and we already had the crossdomain.xml deployed. I used fiddler to see if the crossdomain.xml file was retrieved and I could see it did get the file. So what was happening here? Well as after reading the message over and over again, I finally picked out the following part of the message: “or a policy that is unsuitable for SOAP services”

It happened to be that the way the flex control retrieved the data was different the I did with Silverlight. Therefore I needed to alter the crossdomain.xml file to also include a SOAP call. So the file I now used looks like follows:(See bold line that fixed the problem for me)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
  <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="SOAPAction"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

I know for production use we should not allow just anybody to do calls against our server, but since this is only used during development, this is fine for me now. Once the control is implemented it won’t be making cross domain calls anymore and I don’t need the file. (it is not a part of the deployment package)

So after fixing that I was able to get the data and plot the simple graphs based on the data I got. So all was good again.

But then one day later, I started some additional work on the same project and I got the exact same error message again!?!?!?

So how could that be? I wanted to start and see if the cross domain file might be incorrect or changed by someone else and then I found that the network was not even up and running! So I just simply forgot to plug in my network cable before I start to work and I got the exact same message!

Now I must say that encrypting an error message in such a way it will take a while to figure out what is wrong is one thing, but using the exact same message while there is not even a network available, just beats me. I know that with security in mind, you don’t always want to provide a lot of diagnostics what might be the issue, but just giving everybody a walk around the park with a generic message , just makes no sense to me. I really hope this is not a new trend in security practices.

Cheers,

Marcel

Deep dive event at the Microsoft north Carolina office

marcelv — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:14:00 GMT

I Just got back from my holiday in Tuscany Italy, and am already on the road again. We had a great opportunity to visit the Microsoft Team System development team in Raleigh NC. The team over there is responsible for the Team Foundation Server, Team Web Access, Team Test, Setup & Ops and Team Build. The last one is of particular interest to us, since we rely on Team System and Team build in particular for our software factory Endeavour.

With the 2008 Product we integrate very tightly with and we want to have the same or even a better experience with the 2010 version coming down the pipe. As you all might now by now when you have looked at the B1 bits, is that there are significantly changes between 2008 en 2010. The biggest part is that team build is now using windows Workflow Foundation as the engine behind the build process instead of the MSBuild scripts we had in 2008. Now that adds some pro’s and con’s in terms of building our custom experience on top of that. E.g one thing we will going to miss is the option to only extend the process on specific predefined build targets and adding in our own steps to the process. With 2010 there is no notion of an extensible build script anymore and you will get an workflow instead that you need to copy and tweak according to your needs. On the other hand, it is really great that you can see a visual representation on what the process will look like in terms of phases and steps that compose the build.

One area where we extended the Visual Studio 2008 IDE is in the build configuration wizard. We extended the default dialog to work with our factory concept of Configuration Items (CI’s) instead of crafting up a workspace and selecting solution from there. See screenshot below to give you an idea on how we extended the build definition dialog.

For us a CI is defined as the unit of design, development, test and deployment. A CI can consist out of multiple modules and a module contains a solution or a MSBuild script that does some funky stuff needed for a certain folder in Version control to be build. We knew upfront that build would change drastically in 2010, but we took the decision to create the 2008 experience first and based on what we learn from that build the same or improved version in 2010.

As part of our elaboration work on 2010, we flew over to the NC office and had our first two days of meetings with the team build team. We had the opportunity to look at the current status of the product and work with the team to discuss how we can integrate our notion of a build with the out of box experience of Team Build.

I must say I am pretty pleased in terms of what I see coming in the B2 timeframe which I cannot discuss in public yet, but I can say we have seen significant improvements to the B1 that is out there at this moment.

Our goal is to have a good design crafted up by the end of the week in terms of how we are going to integrate with team build 2010 and even have some early proof of concepts that will work once we get B2. Once I am able to speak public about the B2 build, you can see a couple of post up here on how we use the 2010 engine and how you can create and manage your own build processes, just the way we are doing that as well.

Cheers,
Marcel

How to fix Team build Error in TFS2010 “MSTest.exe not found”

marcelv — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:57:28 GMT

I must say it really helps a lot when you have someone available from the dev teams to solve some issues with the Beta Bits. As I told in my previous post I worked with Adam Bar from the Microsoft North Carolina Office for our devdays pre-conference. While working on my demo’s I ran into a problem where I did have a tests working locally, but once I ran an Team Build on the solution, I always got the message that MSTest.exe could not be found.

This happened to be a known bug on 64 bit machines and can easily be fixed by adding a registry key to the non wow64 node in the registry. It appears that in Beta 1, from the team build environment the location of MSTest is searched in the non 64bit registry location. What you need to do to fix this problem is the following:

Use regedit to add the following Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0

Key Name: InstallDir and set that key to the location where Visual Studio 2010 is installed (e.g. C:\program files\ Microsoft Visual Studio 10\Common7\IDE)

Now start a new build and you will see the build will find MSTest again :-)

Cheers,
Marcel

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: How to fix Worklow designer crash

marcelv — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:54:37 GMT

Last week I gave a presentation internally at our Info Support Knowledge Transfer evenings. Based on a deep dive training I got to attend on Campus begin of May, I presented a session on Windows Workflow 4.0. As you might know I am passionate about two technologies that I try to dig into as deep a s possible and those are visual Studio Team System and Windows Workflow Foundation. During the preparation of my talk on workflow, I obviously wanted to show some workflow designs and create some designs on the fly.

But Every time I wanted to create a new Workflow, the designer crashed and Visual Studio got closed :-(

It took me some while to discover that the crash was caused by the Visual Basic expression editor that gets activated once you create a workflow. This editor was unable to load a required assembly. It appears that this was caused by the fact that I installed Visual Studio at a different location then the default c:\ drive.

In the Beta the bits don’t check the install directory location in the registry but just assume this to be the default location.

But how could I fix this? I did install on D:\ and was not willing to install again, since that would take a lot of time.

After some digging around I found a great solution that is posted at the connect site. You can create a symbolic link at the OS level on the file system.
When you make a c:\profgram Files\Visual Studio 10.0 directory point to the actual installation on the D:\ drive the issue is solved.

You can use the mklink command for that and specify the /J option to create a directory junction. After running mklink as an administrator and restarting Visual Studio , I was able to create workflows.

Hope this helps if you run into the same issue.

Cheers
Marcel

How to make Layer Validation Diagrams work in the build

marcelv — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:10:19 GMT

In Visual studio 2010 Team Architect edition, you have a new type of diagram available, called the layer diagram. What is great about this diagram is that you can use it to actually validate if the source code you have written adheres to the rules you defined in terms of allowed dependencies between layers. This adds great value to the notion of modeling the layers for your product and can help you mandate the rules you pose as an architect are actually followed by the development team.

In the visual studio IDE you can run a layer validation just by right clicking the diagram and selecting the option Validate, as show in screenshot below:

But what If I want to run this validation every time you compile the project, or even better during each build we run on the build server?

Cameron Skinner has a blog post based on the PDC CTP bits, on how you can create the layer diagram and link it into your solution for validation. The Beta 1 we currently use has the option to Validate default available in the dropdown of available actions for the linked diagram. But unfortunately it does not validate straight out of the box.

It took me quite some digging around in the target files that come with the architect edition, but I discovered that there is a property called ValidateArchitectureOnBuild that enables or disables the layer validation during the build.

So in order to enable the build during build, you must add this property to your build file. This can be done by unloading the project and adding the property to the property group that contains several options you select in the properties page of your project.

<PropertyGroup>

…
<ValidateArchitectureOnBuild>true</ValidateArchitectureOnBuild>
</PropertyGroup>

Once you reload the the project and run a local compile you will see the layer diagram is validated during the compilation pass.

Hope this helps you get layer validation running as an integral part of your build process :-)

cheers,
Marcel

Devdays 2009

marcelv — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:11:47 GMT

It has been a few days since we held developer days conference here in the Netherlands. I Must say I was quite pleased to see there where so many attendees especially with the current economic situation.

Devdays is always this special week in the year for me since I tend to always give sessions on the latest greatest technologies and they also happen to ship a CTP or beta drop just a week for such a conference. This year again I had to work day and night to get all demo’s working on the latest available bits since that gives the best impression for the attendees in terms of the current available feature set. This year I presented a Pre Conference session on Visual Studio Team System 2010, together with Adam Barr, who is a Test lead at Microsoft on Team foundation sever. Adam Arrived on Monday and we spend two days getting all the demo’s working correctly. Also Edd Glas from the Team Test Team got over and presented part of the preconference. We decided it was great for the preconference audience to have two people straight from the trenches telling about what they are building. The total content for the Pre Conference covers over 6 hours of content and demos on what is all in the product, and the feedback received during the session was very positive.

On Devdays day 1, I got my personal 2 Minutes of fame during the Keynote Session. (aprox. 1800 people attending). Begin of January I have been selected to become a Microsoft regional Director for the Netherlands together with Anko Duizer. During the Keynote I was asked to talk in maximum 2 Minutes on my vision on ALM and what people should expect to happen in that space the coming year. I Got an picture of a Colleague of mine that has me on stage during the Keynote.

I must say it really looks different from the other side when you are on stage :-)

The second Day I gave my Last session that is called “Modeling that works with code” where I show what you can do with all the great new Modeling and DSL stuff shipping with Team Architect Edition 2010.

This is where I showed the value of modeling up front and Bottom up by generating UML Sequence Diagrams and DGML Diagrams based on the code you have. One of the demo’s I gave was something I was able to craft up with the Help of Edward and Clemens. This is a Demo where you can create new DGML Models using the available .NET API’s. This is very powerful if you e.g. use this in a Daily build and generate diagrams that show stuff like: Classes with a Code Coverage below a certain quality bar, Hot Maps in terms of code Churn mapped to all projects in your product, Lines of code expressed in the size of DGML Nodes, etc. It is amazing what the possibilities are. Clemens and Edward are working e.g. on Architectural Inspections based on the archetypes described in the Patterns And Practices application architecture guide.

If you are interested in the slides from this session, you can download them here.

In a Next Post I will show you how easily you can create a new Diagram based on the available API, and some fixes on visual Studio 2010 I needed to make for all the demo’s to work.

How to enable code coverage in Visual Studio 2010 Unit tests

marcelv — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:14:06 GMT

When you want to Enable code coverage in an Unit test run in Visual Studio 2010 you may find that the steps you need to take have changed.
In Visual Studio 2010 you need to take the following steps:

Open the Local.testsettings file and there you will see a set of items you can configure on the left hand of the dialog.

Here you need to select the “Execution Criteria” in the left list and then you can see at the bottom of the page the set of collectors that are enabled for a test run.

In this list you need to select the “Code Coverage” item and mark the enabled check box. In the 2008 ide you would direct see the assemblies that are part of the coverage gathering during the run. In the 2010 dialog you can select the assemblies by first clicking on the “Code Coverage” row in the collectors list and then clicking the “Advanced…” button. Then you will see the more familiar dialog again as shown below:

Here you need to pick the assembly that is under test and click “Ok”

Now when you run another unit test you will see code coverage is now enabled.
When you take a further look into the set of collectors you might also see a set of new collectors that you have not seen before.

When you enable e.g. the video recorder, you will get an video capture of your computer while the test was running. While this is less interesting for a Unit test that has no UI interactions, this is very interesting when you create a new type of test called Code UI test that can run an previously recorded UI test and replay it on a test machine. You can see the channel 9 video that shows more about coded UI testing if you want some more information on that new feature.

What is interested to see is enabling e.g. the Test Impact collector, that enables the Test Impact feature. Once this collector has run, you can see in the Visual Studio IDE a list of suggested tests based on code changes you have made to your local source. This enables you to run a minimum set of tests to verify changes you have made to the codebase. this test impact analysis can even be used during the Team Builds run e.g. every night on a server, so you can have a lean and mean build that runs only impacted tests to verify regression on previous tests.

When you create a new Unit test in a solution you also might notice that there is a second “testsettings” file created called “TraceAndTestImpact.testsettings”. this file contains all the settings to run a set of unit tests with the correct settings that enable test impact analysis.

Windows 7 RC available soon, very soon

marcelv — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:39:00 GMT

Today I received information that I am allowed to disclose that most people will find very exiting:

Windows 7 RC will be available end of this week!

For MSDN subscribers it will be available at our Queens birthday, April 30th, for the public it will be downloadable May 5th

You can read more about it here on the Windows 7 blog.

Can't wait to get my hand on this new build, it really looks promising if you take a look at all the improvements made while I liked the new OS already :-)

Cheers,
Marcel

How to assign a work item to a group and actually have it show a list of values

marcelv — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:45:00 GMT

Today I was asked one of the most asked questions related to work item tracking: “Can you can assign a work item to a group in stead of a person”?

My standard answer to this question is “yes” and I tell people this can be easily be done by setting the ALLOWEDVALUES to include the attribute expanditems = “false” and add list items that contain the TFS group names.

Since the question came from my team mate I said I would fix the work item type so he did not have to spend to much time for this simple change.

To my surprise I found that it is easy but you have to know one additional fact and that is that you must not have altered the System.AssignedTo to only allow valid users!

So what happened?

I have a work item type called “Deliverable”. This is a work item that can be assigned to a group of developers, designers, testers, etc. So the requirement was simple, have this work item only assigned to a group in stead of a person. What I did was quite simple, for each state definition I just set the ALLOWEDVALUES to the list of groups I want to have the work item assigned to. See the example below:
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<STATE value="Scoped"> 
   <FIELDS> 
      <FIELD refname="System.AssignedTo"> 
          <ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="false"> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Project Managers" /> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Feature Managers"  /> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Software Architects" /> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Designers" /> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Implementers" /> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Testers" /> 
                <LISTITEM value="[project]\Integrators" /> 
          </ALLOWEDVALUES> 
          <REQUIRED /> 
       </FIELD> 
   </FIELDS> 
</STATE> 
After uploading the work item, I got a strange surprise, the assigned to field always appeared empty

It took me quite some time to figure out what happened here. I finally figured out that this is caused by the fact that the Work Item Field definition for System.AssignedTo has a constraint set of <VALIDUSER/> and a TFS group is not considered to be a valid user. (This is something that probably your custom work item has as well since the common way to customize your work items is to pick the Microsoft work items and change those. The Microsoft work item types have this constraint set as well )
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<FIELD reportable="dimension" type="String" name="Assigned To" refname="System.AssignedTo"> 
<strong>  <VALIDUSER /> 
</FIELD> 
So to fix this problem, I removed the <VALIDUSER/> constraint on the System.AssignedTo field. After removing the constraint and restarting Visual Studio after uploading the new type definition(I used WITImport at the command line, but this can also be done using the power tools) , the dropdown will show the options I expected to see.

So it is nice when you know the answer , but here you can see again that only knowing the answer is not enough to be productive, you actually have to have done this so you also know the problems you might run into

Hope this keeps you from pulling your hair out.

Cheers,
Marcel

Hot fix available for Transaction inside receive activity scope bug workflow 3.5

marcelv — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:57:00 GMT

Back in august I worked with a customer to build a workflow solution using Workflow 3.5. We crafted up a simple workflow where we would like to get a message into the workflow using the receive activity and then persist this call in the database, giving the caller a ticket that he can use later for reference. We could do some processing in the background and then when we finish the caller could get information based on the ticket. Now this is in my opinion a very common scenario that you probably will run into with your solutions as well.

to make this scenario more reliable, we used a transaction scope activity to guard the database transaction and make sure the workflow get's persisted in the same transaction.

A simplified version of the workflow we used is shown below.

Now this looks to work perfectly correct, but we discovered that if the transaction fails you will get the following error:

"Workflow service unexpectedly unloaded from memory while executing a ReceiveActivity. Make sure that the the workflow does not contain any blocking activities within a ReceiveActivity."

After getting the error back the workflow will be terminated since it got an unexpected exception.
Things can even become worse if you look from the messaging perspective, that the caller will recieve an timeout on the call, since no reply is send back. It appeared that this happened when you set the UnloadOnIdle to false.

To make sure I did not do anything wrong I called a friend who is also very knowledgeable about workflow and asked him what his thoughts where. He also made a blog post about this issue and spend quite some time to figure out what was going wrong here. (http://msmvps.com/blogs/theproblemsolver/archive/2008/08/06/using-a-transactionscopeactivity-with-a-wcf-receiveactivity.aspx)

Finally I decided that this looked like a bug in the activities, so I issues a PSS call to ask for a hot fix for this problem. After working with the support department and some developers on a simple repro of the problem we finally got to the point that it was recognized as a bug and that they could build a hot fix to solve the problem.

So back in November I received a private hot fix that solved the problem, but I wanted to make sure everybody else could leverage the fix as well, since this is such an common scenario.

I crafted up some tests to show the problem and I could use that easily to verify if the hot fix solved the problem or not. You can see below that after applying the hot fix all tests showed green again :-)

Before:

After:

Last week I got the official hot fix and the analysis back from the development team that states the following:

Root cause of the problem:

WorkflowRequestContext, a member of ReceiveActivity, is not serialized as part of the checkpoint. Consequently, when we restore the checkpoint upon TSA fault, we are unable to send a reply message to the ReceiveActivity caller.

We produced a fix to address this issue and delivered to our customer. This fix will be part of the next major releases of WF 3.5 (if any). KB Article 959362 will be published soon

So if you have this same scenario in your solution, check what happens when your transaction fails, e.g. by stopping the database so the call will fail, and see if you run into the same issue. The problem I found with this bug, is that this only surfaces when you have good tests in place that also test for the failure of the transaction and that is probably not always the case. You might not even have noticed you have a problem, but at least you know you can get a hot fix now. You can refer to KB 959362 and they can hand you the hot fix for your environment.

Cheers,
Marcel

Security update for Team System Web Access SP1

marcelv — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:11:00 GMT

I just found out that on January 16th Microsoft has released an security update for Team System Web Access that I would urge everybody to install. You can read more on the update on Hakan Eskici's blog here.

Note that this is a full install so you must run an uninstall and install to complete. This means you will have some downtime to apply this update.

I just wanted to give everybody a heads up on this.

Cheers
Marcel

Yessssss, Another year as MVP!

marcelv — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:21:00 GMT

When I got back in the office this morning I was very pleased to see the Congratulations email in my inbox. Little excerpt from the mail:

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

Toby Richards
General Manager
Community Support Services

I feel really privileged to be awarded for a 4th year in a row as Team System MVP.

The most important reason I am so glad to be awarded Team System MVP is that it enables me to be part of a community of really great and knowledgeable people. Not only is the Team System team a great group of people to work with, they also really value the feedback we give and transform our feedback in shaping the product to be the best ALM offering around against a really affordable price.

I want to thank Microsoft in recognizing the work I have done last year for the Team System and developer community. I also want to thank Info Support since they enable me to work at the bleeding edge of technology and support the work I do in the community as Architect, Speaker and Author.

Happy New Year!

Cheers,
Marcel

First release of Team System Web Access Translations now available!

marcelv — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:56:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I already posted about the fact that we have made great progress on the translation project at codeplex.

I am proud to announce that we completed the first set of languages and we have a first release available for download at codeplex.

The following languages are now available in addition to the default languages available from Microsoft:

· Croatian, done by Ognjen Bajic

· Portuguese (Brazilian), done by Igor Abade and Ramon Durães.

· Turkish, done by Cengiz Han, Coskun Sunali and Okan Tekeli

· Danish, done by Gert Christiansen

· Swedish, done by Mathias Olausson

· Polish, done by Marek Byszewski

· Dutch, done by myself J

So what do you get when you download the installer?

We provide you with a very straight trough installation process. We have a MSI installer and the only clicks needed are accepting the license agreement (the same as on codeplex and you are done. The installer will automatically detect if Team System Web Access SP1 is installed on your box and it will use the path found to install the additional resource files. If Team System Web Access is not installed, the installer will refuse to install, since installation would make no sense in these conditions.

For a user to see the pages in its favorite language, he might need to set the profile options in Team System Web Access. If the user has e.g. an English OS setup, but wants to view the pages in e.g. Dutch, he can force Team System Web Access to always use Dutch and ignore the browser settings for the preferred language. To make this happen go to the settings->profile->options page (found at the right side of the home page) and there go to the regional Settings tab. There you see a drop down that defaults to "browser accepted language" and you can there select e.g. Dutch. After clicking OK, the page will refresh and you will see the site in the selected language. Any user that has already a localized version of the OS installed will most of the time get the translated pages, since the default browser settings will take the localization settings of the user as the preferred language.

One question that might pop your mind is do I need SP1 of Team System Web Access? And the answer is yes you do. This is because SP1 enables the multi language feature that we use to provide the additional translation. The good news is that this does not mean you are required to install SP1 of TFS. Although it is a very good practice that you would keep your server to the latest service pack level, it is not required by team system web access Sp1.

Now that we have released, it is also time to address the fact that we might have made some mistakes in the translations. If you find any typo's, misspelled words or other errors, please be so kind as to provide us with feedback, using the issue tracker at codeplex. Please make sure you provide information which language you found the bug, how it manifests itself and what the correct spelling would be. We will make sure as a team to fix them a.s.a.p. and provide you with a new version promptly.

My special Thanks go out to all contributors to the project and Microsoft especially, since they were so kind as to help us with the resource files that are needed to do this project.

For the next release we already have a few other people working on new languages. The once currently in development are Portuguese, Norwegian and Arabic.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please contact me (using the contact tools on my blog or at codeplex) and I will get back to you a.s.a.p. and provide you with the proper access and instructions to contribute.

Please give us your feedback on what you think of this project.

Cheers,

Marcel

TSWAL project working towards a first release

marcelv — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:59:00 GMT

The past few weeks a lot of contributers have been extremely busy getting a first release out of the door of our Team System Web Access Translation project. I bloged about this initiative previously and I just wanted to give you a little update. We currently are working towards a release somewhere end of october, begin of november. We have currently contributions for the languages:

Portugees (Brazilian)
Turkish
Dutch
Norwegian
Swedish (this one is not confirmed yet)

We also created a very nice installer that will install all additional languages at the right location with only two clicks (yes, first the licence, then finsh and you are done J)

I think that is a nice list for a first release I would say. At codeplex you can follow the progress we make, but to give you a little teaser, I thought I would post some screenshots for the Dutch and Potugees version, as they have already finished their work.

If you would like to participate in this project on a language not supported yet, then please let me know. I am happy to accept you as a contributer and I will give you the instructions needed to commit to the repository.

Portugees (Brazilian) version of the home page (click on images to enlarge)

Portugees (Brazilian) version add new document library

Dutch version the Home Page

Dutch version of add new document library

Cheers,
Marcel