I have been in Singapore this week attending the Longhorn Server Touchdown training and now it’s over, I have been catching up on my RSS feeds. What little gem did I spy just a little while ago?  

Well from the title of the blog post, I guess you already know

Soma announced the availability of the following;

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1
  (includes SP1 updates for Standard, Professional, and Team Editions of Visual Studio 2005)
  • Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1

    • Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1

      • Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta </ul>

      The guys at Microsoft have been really busy listening to our feedback and this is very evident in the list of fixes and improvements they have made with the service pack. Looks like I have some updates to do once I get back to Brisbane…

Well it looks like VSTS is a hot topic in Australia with the announcement of Australia’s THIRD VSTS User group!

The first Australian VSTS user group, the Melbourne VSTS Users Group kicked off on the 29th September 2005 and is believed to be the first VSTS user group anywhere in the world! I have had the pleasure of presenting to the folks at this user group and Joe does a great job of running the user group.

The second Australian VSTS user group, the Queensland VSTS Users Group kicked off it’s first meeting on 1st December 2006 in Brisbane. We’ve also just had our membership of Ineta accepted and we’re rapidly approaching over 100 users.

Australia’s third, and just announced, VSTS Users Group is forming in Canberra with its first meeting due on the 24th January in the Microsoft Office in Canberra. Read more about this new VSTS Users group on Nils van Boxsel’s blog.

While on the subject of VSTS User’s Groups, I want to say a quick Hi to Michael Ruminer and good luck with the Team System Public Users Group which kicks off just before Christmas in the Waltham, MA.

Wow – Australia is certainly the place to be for VSTS action

Following the official announcement of Datadude at TechEd in Boston this year as well as 7 CTP’s, Matt Nunn announced the following;

“On Friday 1st December 2006 the development team officially announced that Data Dude was done and was being released to manufacture. It should be available for download to MSDN subscribers on December 7th 2006 and generally available for purchase on January 1st 2007“

So only a couple of days to go now before eligible MSDN subscribers can get there hands on the RTM version.

Read Matt’s blog post and visit the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals website

As promised, Brian Harry has new posted the Team Foundation Server Roadmap on his blog for all the world to see.

If I had to choose a paragraph the summarise the upcoming Orcas release from the roadmap, this would be it.

“Overall, Orcas is a “minor” release for TFS.  Partly this is mandated by the fact that TFS shipped later than the rest of VS in the 2005 wave.  We want to sync back up for the Orcas wave and that means doing less.  Our goal for the Orcas release of TFS is to make it an “adoption focused release”.  We are allocating most of our time to removing issues that customers have told us hamper their adoption.  As a result, in the feature list below, you’ll see an emphasis on administration, operations & setup.”

From the list of things they are looking at for the Orcas release you can see they Microsoft really do listen to the community’s feedback. I know many people will be very happy to see a few major pain points being addressed in the next release.

If you want to know where Microsoft is going with the next release of TFS, make sure you read the full article.

One of my pet dislikes about TFS is the lack of a good management interface to do all the repetitive tasks that need to be done. Well there’s some goods news out today with the release of TFS Permission Manager from the team in Israel.  I’ve just downloaded the tool (2.3Mb) and spent the past 15 minutes having a quick tour and I’ve got to say this tool rocks!

In addition the managing security across TFS, SRS and WSS, this tool also provides a nice interface to manage Area Path permissions and Source Control permissions to boot. The UI seems nice and responsive and so far it seems to be reporting and changing permissions without any issues at all.

If you’re administering a TFS server and response for configuring security, this tool is well worth a look.

Hi to Chuck whose blog post alerted me to this news.

Based on the strong interest shown by the Brisbane developer community during the VSTSTechBrekkie series, I am pleased to announce the formation of the Queensland VSTS Users Group.

The Queensland VSTS Users Group is based in Brisbane and will meet for a breakfast session on the first Friday morning of each month. Brekkie is available from 7:30am with the actual meeting running from 8am to 9am. The first session is focused on driving up the quality of your applications using Checkin policies. This will include adding new checkin policies and how to write your own checkin policies. The user group sessions will focus on a wide range of VSTS and TFS related topics with upcoming sessions planned to include the VSTS architecture tools, editing to process template, customizing reports and much more.

Details of our inaugural meeting are as follows;

Venue: Microsoft Brisbane Office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle Street, Brisbane QLD Australia. 
Duration: Catering from 7:30AM for an 8:00AM Start. Finish at approximately 9:00AM
On: Friday, 1 December 2006

To register to join the users group and to find out more information about our first meeting, visit the user group website at www.qvstsug.org

Like many over the past few days, I have downloaded and installed the release versions of Windows Vista and Office 2007 on a test machine. The build went something like this;

• Windows Vista Ultimate
  • Windows Live Messenger
    • Windows Live Writer Beta
      • Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
        • Visual Studio Team Foundation Explorer
          • Daemon Tools 4.0.6
            • Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (Beta)
              • Office 2007 Professional
                • Office 2007 SaveAs PDF or XPS addon
                  • Windows Powershell for Vista (RC2)

                    </ul>

                  I’ve still got a few tools and utilities I need on the test machine and I know it’s going to be fun finding out which ones are going to play nicely on Vista. If you haven’t grabbed the bits and started playing with them, you certainly should be considering it. The Vista install is a very smooth experience now if your hardware’s up to it.

A big thank you to all those who attended the VSTSTechBrekkie Hands on Lab day that was held at New Horizons office in Brisbane last Friday (10Nov2006). It was great to see people eager to use the product after attending the series of four presentations that were delivered during October.

I was especially impressed by those people that turned up for the Friday afternoon session after a long week at work. Friday mornings might work very well for a breakfast session but I’ve learnt that Friday afternoon’s aren’t always a good time for a technical hands on session.

I have been installing a new dual-server installation of TFS this week and I have come across a problem when I try to install SQL SP1 on the data tier. I have started by following the TFS Installation Guide and after the initial SQL 2005 (Std Edn) install, I have chosen to install SQL 2005 SP1 rather than install just the hotfix.

A quick run of en_SQL_server_sp1_x86.exe kicks off the SQL Service Pack 1 installation on the server and it all runs smoothly until the end when the following error is displayed.

After the requisite reboot, the following error logs appear in the System event log.

Event ID: 7009 “Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the SQL Server Integration Services service to connect.”

followed immediately by

Event ID: 7000 “The SQL Server Integration Services service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.”

Manual attempts to start the service result in an error dialog appearing with “Could not start the SQL Server Integration Services service on Local Computer. Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.”

The cause of this issue in my case is that I am installing SQL behind a corporate firewall and the server has no outbound Internet access. This prevents the call to the CryptoAPI checking the Certificate Revocation List at crl.microsoft.com which it does for the SQL Server assembly files. The long delay while the check is being attempted causes the Service Control Manager to report the SSIS service is taking too long to start and the service does not start.

To fix this problem, you need to look at knowledge base article 918222 and install in the correct documented sequence, each of the post SP1 hotfixes. After a reboot at the end of this the server is up and the SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) service is running happily.

Now onto the rest of the TFS dual-server installation

Links:

KB Article 918644, “FIX: The SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) service does not start when you install SQL Server 2005 SP1 on a computer that is already running the SSIS service“.

KB Article 918222, “Cumulative hotfix package (build 2153) for SQL Server 2005 is available“

With the raft of new releases coming out from Microsoft at the moment I felt it very important to reiterate Jason Barile’s Warning about upgrading WSS to v3.0 on Team Foundation Server.

Basically if you want TFS to play nice and behave itself, you should keep WSS 3.0 away from it at least for a while to come yet. Not even the upcoming TFS service pack will help.