Haven’t stolen a tip from Sara Ford for a while, so there, another tip for VSTS 2008.

So, this one shows how to go directly to the code samples from within Visual Studio.

To get to the samples installed for VS, you only need to go to Help-Samples and click on the local Samples folder link in the browser.

Note, the samples are in a .zip file and need to be extracted first.

More on Sarah’s tips: she has a book, called Visual Studio Tips, 251 Way to Improve Your Productivity, full of useful tips on Visual Studio.

When your work circles around TFS, it’s nice to know whenever a new Work Item is assigned or the status of an old one gets changed. E-mail alerts are perfect in that sense. I just came across this blog post on setting up E-mail alerts from TFS through Gmail. Getting TFS alerts in your gmail account can be handy you use a lot of Goodle apps for work. Lev Blavias, the author of the post, recommends this link to help set up the alerts. He notes, that for the connection to work the following components need to be installed first: Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2008 Power Tool, Stunnel, and an SMTP virtual server needs to be set up on the machine.

But google apps and gmail are still far from being THE all-enterprise system for itnernal use, so for a lot of companies linking Microsoft Office with TFS is much more relevant.

Speaking of e-mail, some tools already offer connectors linking MS Outlook and TFS. The nice thing about such tools is that you don’t have to go through a lengthy set-up process yourself, as it’s already been configured for you. All it takes is to install the add-on and alas! Not only do you get your TFS alerts in Outlook, you can also create new TFS work items and meetings without ever opening TFS.

Here’s how this could look:

Installing TFS 2008 with Sql Server 2008 can be quite problematic, especially when it comes to the SQL Server Reporting Services.

Here’s a problem a recent geekswithblogs.net post discusses.

If you realize your configuration tool has issues with prior installations of software, and the report urls are pointing to a SQL Express directory, it’s best to go over the set up of virtual directories manually. This requires application pool set up.

Chris Eargle in his post suggets that the service user be assigned to run the pool, after which the user should be granted write access to the RSTempFiles folder.

What’s weird, is that at this point an error pops up saying: “the path is not a legal form.”

Alas, here’s a solution:

if you receive this error, you need to add your application pool user to the SQLServerReportServerUser (followed by $servername$instancename) group. It’s that simple, but the error doesn’t indicate what is necessary to fix it.

Eugene Zakhareyev writes on TFS permissions and lists some principles to keep in mind when working with permissions. Here’s his list of best practices when it comes to working with the most problematic permissions area, version control specific permission issues :

1. Set as few permissions as possible. Ideally, you would set permissions on server, project and immediate project subfolders at most (and set server/project permissions by assignment to appropriate pre-defined groups). That way you will be able to immediately know where to look for the “root” of any permission problem.
2. Never set permission on files (that can be viewed as more of the same topic as in previous paragraph, but I cannot say that enough).
3. Use inheritance as much as possible; start with most permissive set-up and partition by using Deny.
4. If you find yourself setting certain permissions more than once, script them using tf permissions (use tfssecurity for global and area permissions). In this way potential for human error is minimized.

Mac Noland posted his solution to a bug in TFS that happens when you try to delete (or perform other workspace actions) on a workspace owned by a user who no longer is in Active Directory.

What they did was manually updating the TfsVersionControl, Tbl_Workspace table and changing the OwerId field to a valid user for that workspace.

Our team encountered the a bug in TFS’05, TFS’05 SP1, and TFS’08 where we’d get GCHandle error whenever we tried to create WorkItem through WorkItemTracking API.

After a while of pondering on what and how, we solved it by creating an IIS Application Pool for each tire of the application. Then wherever the access to WorkItemStore API was required in the configuration, the team used the following settings: (priorly granting the IIS Application Pool user rights to write in YOUR CACHE FOLDER catalogue)…and guess what? The problem was gone.

Some tips from a Microsoft MVP on what you should do whenever you are upgrading to TFS 2008 and enounter a problem:

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.

And for the source code, which surely no one can afford losing:

Create a disaster recovery plan and test it. Yet again, Microsoft provides all the documentation you need for this on MSDN, but here’s what I did:

1. Create a VM with Windows Server installed on it.
2. Add the server to the same domain as your current TFS install.
3. Install TFS and all the same bits you have on your production system.
4. Backup the VM.
5. Now test the DS plan on the VM using the move instructions from MSDN (above).
6. 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.

Good luck updating. =)

Just how automated is your work? Do you think you spend enough time on actually writting code, or maybe you could use some of that time you waste on solving technical problems?

How do you avoid the lengthy setup, infrastructure and management problems and leave enough time to deliver productivity? Here’s a list of some basic things that should be done for that purpose:

1- Source Code Control
2- Unit Testing and coverage
3- Continuous Integration and monitoring
4- Documentation (!!!)
6- Bug fix and source control integration
7- Logging software errors
8- Implementing database and its changes fast and automated
9- Test, UAT, release procedures
10- Communication procedures

For a detailed description of each step follow the link.