July 2007 - Posts

TFS Web Access Power Tool

Take a look at the official release of the TFS Web Access tool (formally 'TeamPlain')

What's to say? It give you access to the TFS server via your web browser rather than Visual Studio. I like the way it resolves our Active directory id's into our real names in the changeset reports.

Installation was extreemly easy, simply installing itself as a new website on your TFS server.

And it just feels good to start a build and watch its progress via your web browser.

I can now use my underpowered laptop next to my development desktop to monitor and control TFS. Pretty good.
posted Monday, July 30, 2007 11:18 PM by andrewwhitten

MSI Build Error with TFS Build Server and WiX

I found that my WiX 3.0 project was not building on my Team Foundation Server build machine.

For the benefit of search engines, the exact line was:

"light.exe(0,0): error LGHT0216: An unexpected Win32 exception with error code 0x659 occurred: This installation is forbidden by system policy. Contact your system administrator"

At first I thought that WiX was attempting to install on the server.. but after some digging I found out that it was just trying to run a verification of the MSI file.

Under my Windows 2003 machine the builder was a standard user with no permission to do this.

Therefore the resolution was to go into the properties of the WiX Project in Visual Studio, and click the 'Advanced...' button in the 'Linker' tab.

(By the way, you may need to resize your screen a bit for this button to refresh and show up)

In the resultant window, select the 'Supress MSI/MSM validation' under the 'Suppresions' tab.

Everything should work fine now :) I guess the next question would be.. what to do when you need a validation of your MSI? I guess this is a good case for running build as an administrator under an XP box.
posted Wednesday, July 25, 2007 12:23 AM by andrewwhitten

Update TFS Reports

I made some changes to my Team Foundation Server builds, and wanted to check out the nice new reports.. only to see they havn't been updated yet.

Kevin Castle has a good overview of this, explaining that the data warehouse does not update itself right away. There is a web service he suggests that you call, although the manual web address for me is different (SP1 maybe?)

http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx?op=Run
posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:59 AM by andrewwhitten

Connect to Team Foundation Server with an IP Address

I have a virtual machine image of TFS in workgroup mode that I want to try out some project settings on before promoting to the production TFS server I have on the domain.

However, it seems that attaching Visual Studio Team Explorer to this machine is not possible by directly connecting to its IP Address.

What you can do is modify your hosts file in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc (under Windows XP) and associate a name with the IP Address.

You should now find you can connect using this name.

posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 12:58 AM by andrewwhitten