Langleyben Leon

Team Foundation Server beta3 Advantures (#2)

More TFS impressions:

• A lot of syntax changes everywhere. Database names, Element names in Process templates, Work Item definitions, Built in group names are renamed.
• Project delete utility still not functioning properly. It claims for successful project removal, but project name remains taken.
• As I wrote earlier, Team Project creation failure locks project name and prevent using it in the future. I found very ugly, but effective way to workaround it: change project name in two places in TFS database. To do it, open SQL Server client on TFS data layer, in database tfsintegration locate table tbl_projects. Change locked project_name (for example MyProject to Failed1. In database tfsworkitemtracking locate table TreeNodes rename your project name (Name field). Note that this method do not perform any cleanup, it leaves garbage in database. It is useful only to release locked project name for additional use.
• Sometimes invalid workitem type passed validation successfully. We have workitem which used "[Global]\Namespace Administrators" group to define field constraint. In beta3 group was renamed into "Team Foundation Administrators". WorkItem validation succeeds but actual import failed with very un-descriptive error message. We resolved this only with help of Aliaksei Baturytski from Microsoft. I hope next version of utilities will provide better error reporting.

Team Foundation Server beta3 is up and running!

After long, but pretty straight-forward installation it's done.

First impressions:

• Team System Client refused to be installed on Win2K SP4. I hope it is just my build; otherwise we will have a huge problem.
• There is a lot of syntax changes in Project Template. Most of them seam to be logical and reasonable, but make me to do a lot of manual changes. I hope those will be documented, so somebody will come up with some kind of converter (say XSLT ). I'll try to publish list of changes, I've encounter later.
• One bug we hope will be gone a long time ago: There is some cleanup/rollback problem, after project creation failure project name remains taken, and you can not use it any more. I will try to use project remove utility in the morning. It was not functional in beta2, hopefully it behaves better now.

It is a small step, but I'll keep you posted.

Longhorn PDC2005 CTP setup on VPC

I finally succeeded to setup Longhorn Advanced Server PDC2005 CTP (from famous disk 6) on VPC 2004.
Couple of notes:

• You can not mount Longhorn iso image in VPC directly. The reason is simple: VPC is not working very well with DVD images. You should burn it on the separate disk and then capture it from VPC.
• I was unable to setup on new virtual disk (vhd). Longhorn setup insisted that partition is unavailable. To overcome this, I used old Win98 vhd, and formatted it from Longhorn setup.
• The last thing: be patient, on 512Mb virtual machine, setup is painfully slow.

PDC2005 Highlights

Here are some of PDC2005 highlights after 2days of conference. Hopefully I will dive into some of them in my next posts. In the meanwhile get familiar with the new buzz.

Windows Vista - former Longhorn
   WCF (Windows Communication Foundation - former Indigo)
   WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation - former Avalon)
   WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation)
IIS7 - new generation of Web server with accent on modularity
Next generation of .NET Languages (C#3.0, VB9.0)
   Lambda expressions
   Local types
   Extender methods
LINQ - Language Independent Queries
Expression - New Tool Suite for designers
   Acrylic - Graphic editor for GUI designers
   Sparkle - XAML interface designer
   Quartz - Web Designer
Office12 - New office generation with productivity and collaboration in mind
VSTO - Visual Studio Tools for Office
VSTA - Visual Studio Tools for Applications. New, .NET languages based, extensibility model for application, which should offer better choice then traditional VB scripting support.

Windows API Reference for C#, VB.NET and VB6

Another great API reference site. I found there some stuff that is missing at pinvoke.net