For anyone that attended the Australian Ready Launch events and received the Ready Launch DVD pack, you may want to check disk 3 in the pack. Disk 3 has the Hands on Labs for Visual Studio Team System and on the four sets of disks I have tried, everyone of them had a corrupt VPC image so you couldn’t actually do the VSTS HOLs.

To check this, simply try to install the VPC image on the third disk. If your disk is corrupt you will get a CRC error when it tries to extract Disk 2 M.vhd.

If your Disk 3 has a corrupt VPC image, check out Chuck’s blog on how to order a replacement disk 3.

I was checking out the ServerSide.NET this morning and happened across a post talking about their recent interview with the “BlogFather of Visual Studio Team System”. This could be none other than Rob Caron.

Rob Caron, also known as the BlogFather of Visual Studio Team System, sits down to discuss VSTS installation and adoption issues and how Microsoft plans to make such a large and complex product easier to understand and implement.

Read the article here and be sure to watch the TechTalk

In my consulting role, I am coming across more organisations starting to take advantage of VSTS and Team Foundation Server. Today I had a situation arise where I was asked what does this mean “TF30321: The name you typed is already used for another team project on the Team Foundation Server.”  While the meaning is actually quite self evident, the user was adamant they had not tried to create a team project with that name before. They even opened Team Explorer and confirmed that there was not a team project already created with that name.

[I have seen this error before but usually only on my test TFS installations and I have had the luxury of just throwing a “2” or “3” on the project name and moving forward ]

This problem can occur when people try to create a team project and the creation fails for some reason. The wizard is often not able to roll things back cleanly and you end up with an inconsistent team project that does not appear on the team explorer list. This then prevents a project with that name being created in the future on that server.

One of the best ways to get a complete list of all team projects, including those that have failed and may not appear in the team explorer is to follow the advice of James Manning in this blog entry. A quick run of his ListTeamProjects utility showed a handful of projects with the dreaded [New] status. Now I’m off to see how I fair with “TfsDeleteProject /force xyz”.

 

Well it is not really a VSTS post but given the fact that I have made extensive use of Virtual Server 2005 during the past year or so while evaluating each of the Team Foundation Server Betas and CTPs I thought I would post this piece of news.

The Second Release (R2) of Virtual Server 2005 is a marked improvement from the first release and I have found it to be quite a bit more responsive to boot. I have it running in the office on a server with an Intel Dual Core CPU and Windows Server 2003 64bit. It runs the three server TFS stack (App/Data & Build) very well and the Virtual Server API makes it easy to right simply controller apps to start the stack up in sequence, suspend state when needed and back the servers up easily. 

Some of the significant enhancements include;

• Virtual Server host clustering
• iSCSI support
• x64 support (runs natively within a 64-bit Windows host OS)
• Enhanced PXE booting
• Improved hyperthreading

If you are not an MSDN subscriber, you can download a 180 day evaluation version from the Microsoft Website

 

You may have noticed that I have been a bit quiet during the past few weeks although I am not what you would call a frequent or regular blogger. Since the conclusion of the Microsoft Ready Launch events I have been put through an interesting few weeks that have been a real test for me.

I have suffered through the loss of my Broadband connection for eleven days due to what I can only surmise was routine maintenance gone wrong on the part of the wholesale provider. The rectification of this problem as caused the loss of my home phone for a day as well.

I have been without my car for two weeks while they repair some hail damage suffered on the way to a client on the Gold Coast a couple of months ago and we have had two scorchingly hot weeks while I have been travelling to and from work in a non-air conditioned bus.

I have been sick with a nasty cold/flu bug that I have managed to develop into a nasty sinus/throat and eye infection and had three days off work lying in bed.

What this experience has reminded me is;

• how integral digital communication has become in my life and I expect this may be very true for many of you reading this blog. Count the number of times you use the Internet each day for routine things you may not stop to think about. Without my internet connection I couldn’t check my email, use my VOIP phone, do my internet banking, check the movie times at the local cinema, find out what time a particular shop opened and many more things not counting work related activities.
• there are many people in the world far worse off than me and I shouldn’t take my health or my creature comforts for granted. Try being without these things for a little while and you soon learn to appreciate them a lot more.

One of the most common things I have been asked about in the past month is what do I need to do to backup my TFS installation. As more organisations start using the TFS Beta 3 Refresh, they are interested in putting into place critical processes such as backup and restore. The good news is that preliminary documentation on this has just become available.

Check out Rob Caron’s post on Preliminary Team Foundation Docs which points us off to the Visual Studio Team System User Education blog where the following preliminary documentation is available now.

• Backup and restore procedures
• Team Foundation Server Permissions
• Team Foundation Server Default Groups, Permissions and Roles

I read some great news on Brian Harry’s blog over the weekend that shows Team Foundation Server can support development teams of up to 2,000 users rather then the 500 users reported in their early guidance documentation. Admitedly, this was done on some fairly hefty hardware but if your teams are this size then the hardware costs would undoubtedly be well worth it anyway. Read his full blog post here.

The Australian Ready Launch event reached my home town yesterday with the event being held in the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. The community launch event was well attended on Wednesday night with around 100 developers converging on the local Microsoft office for some refreshments and some good geek talk. I was asked quite a few questions on Visual Studio Team System and particularly the Team Foundation Server. It is great to see people out there getting stuck into this great new product, especially given the fact that TFS isn’t released until Q1 next year. My message for folks out there is “Don’t wait – start evaluating it now.”

The business launch event on Thursday saw Andrew, Chuck and myself once again going through the sessions in the developer track. It was good to see an audience of a couple of hundred developers turn up to see some great new features in Visual Studio 2005 Team System, SQL 2005 and Biztalk 2006. The sessions all seemed to go well with only a couple of minor glitches along the way. Based on the number of questions that people asked at the end of each session, there are quite a few people out there eagerly getting involved in the new releases which is great to see. I had to take off before Andrew and Chuck finished their final smart client session but I have already heard it went very well for them.

One final comment… I must say that seeing the effort that goes on behind the scenes putting these events together for the Australian developer community, I have the utmost respect for Frank and his DPE team. Being on the road for three weeks expending the level of energy they do is a tough gig. Now the Launch Events are drawing to a close, they only get a brief rest before they move onto planning for the next Security Submit. For what it’s worth, I hope you guys know you are well appreciated by everyone I talk to in the developer community

Rob Caron has just reported the news that the December CTP of Team Foundation Server is now available to MSDN Subscribers. (I checked over the weekend and didn’t notice it  ) He makes a special note that this CTP version of the product has a number of key limitations consistent with being a CTP release.

The December CTP of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is not supported by a Go-Live license and cannot be used for production deployments. Migration from this release to the final RTM product will NOT be supported. Customers requiring a stable release of Team Foundation Server for production use should download Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Refresh and complete the associated Go-Live license.

 

 

Here’s one for your favourites folder in IE.

Visual Studio Team System Tech Notes

TechNotes are short, focused technical articles that explain a specific concept or walk through a particular scenario. TechNotes are intended to supplement the product documentation and technical articles. In addition, we have brought together some of our very best blog postings in a central location.

Topics on the site currently include;

• General
  • Architecture
    • Development
      • Testing
        • Project Management
          • Team Foundation Server
            • Team Foundation Build
              • Team Foundation Version Control
                • Team Foundation Work Item Tracking</ul> I’ve noticed this information on a few blogs over the weekend but Rob & BT were both quick to share the news. (BT emailed me but didn’t blog about it for a couple of days)