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Stuart Preston's Blog

Stuart was CTO for Application Consulting EMEA at EMC Consulting until October 2009, now blogging at http://stuartpreston.net

  • Moving on...

    After 9.5+ years of being part of the family (woodwork?) at OS Integration, Conchango and EMC Consulting I have decided to take a break before doing something technical again.  Today is my last day.  All the blog posts here will be preserved, and I plan to continue blogging at http://stuartpreston.net 

    I will be presenting at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles in November about our experiences with Scrum, Team Foundation Server and the new features of the v3.0 Scrum for Team System template with Simon Bennett, keep your eye on this page for details: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT09 

    Perhaps see some of you there!

  • Scrum for Team System v3.0 - plans.

    Now that Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 are available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads, we’d like to announce our broad plans for Scrum for Team System.

    The next release of Scrum for Team System will be v3.0 and like the prior releases our aim is to ship as soon as possible after release of Team Foundation Server. Some of the significant features of v3.0 include:

    • Significant enhancements to overall template modelling, including a new link hierarchy.
    • Enhancements to the backend Work Remaining and State Transition services.
    • Full integration with the Test and Lab Management toolset.
    • 32 and 64-bit Team Foundation Server support.
    • Contextual guidance within the template.
    • Improved installation experience especially with WSS/MOSS environments and support for “scale out” topologies.
    • many more!

    At the moment we are working hard on getting a Beta of our template working against TFS 2010 Beta 1 and I will announce here when it is available. We know a lot of you are itching to get your hands on the bits but please be patient whilst we continue with development and testing.

    Thank you for your continued support of our template and for making it the most popular process template for Team System (23,000 downloads and counting since v1...).

    If you have any feedback on our template and tools we would love to hear about it – please email us at scrumforteamsystem@emc.com

  • Scrum for Team System v2.2, SQL Server 2008 and the Team Project portal.

    If you have implemented Scrum for Team System v2.2 in a TFS 2008 environment with SQL Server 2008 as the database, then you will find that you get the below error when viewing the Team Project portal

    “Client found response content type of '', but expected 'text/xml'. The request failed with an empty response.No Reports”.

    This occurs because SQL Server 2008 has a different web service URL to SQL Server 2005 and the component that lives on the WSS/MOSS server formulates the wrong URL.

    I’ve attached a fixed assembly that will work with both SQL Server 2005 and 2008, this needs to be dropped into the GAC of the server running WSS or MOSS with Scrum for Team System.  Future versions will likely not take this dependency on the TFS server.

  • Scrum for Team System v2.2 and 64-bit Sharepoint (WSS or MOSS)

    A few support queries and tweets have come up recently about our support for 64-bit Sharepoint (WSS or MOSS) with Scrum for Team System v2.2 and TFS.  The crux of the issue seems to be the ability of the installer to detect the location of WSS as it is not looking in the correct place in the registry to support both 32 and 64-bit installers, this prevents the installation proceeding on 64-bit Sharepoint environments.

    Future versions will correct this but here are the manual installation steps:

    Copy Conchango.TeamSystem.Scrum.Sharepoint.wsp from your TFS server (%ProgramFiles%\Conchango\Scrum for Team System\SFTS WSS Template or see attached) to your MOSS environment.

    Add the solution to Sharepoint:

    stsadm.exe -o addsolution -filename "<path>\Conchango.TeamSystem.Scrum.Sharepoint.wsp"

    Deploy the solution to web farm:

    stsadm.exe -o deploysolution -name "Conchango.TeamSystem.Scrum.Sharepoint.wsp" -local -allowgacdeployment -allcontenturls -allowcaspolicies

    Please also reference my earlier post: http://blogs.conchango.com/stuartpreston/archive/2009/01/21/scrum-for-team-system-v2-x-and-distributed-setups-remote-wss-or-moss.aspx for some things to be aware of in this scenario.

    Update: Thanks Roger Wilson for pointing out the -force option on the deploysolution command shouldn't be used.  I've removed it.

  • Scrum for Team System v2.x and distributed setups (remote WSS or MOSS)

    As part of work recently to improve how we test the Scrum for Team System template and tools across different platforms, we have discovered there are a few additional manual steps to take when you are installing the template in a distributed environment (i.e. you are using a remote WSS 3 or MOSS 2007 server to host your Team Project Portals).

    First of all, when WSS is not installed locally on the TFS App Tier machine, Integrated Windows authentication is not set for the Default Web Site.  This then means that Applications created under Default Web Site inherit the ‘Enable anonymous access” authentication setting.  Unfortunately this affects the correct operation of the services that underpin correct operation of Scrum for Team System v2.x.

    You may also see in a Team Project portal a message that states that an account IUSR_<machinename> is not authorized or licensed to connect to the TFS server (the message may be different according to the version of TFS you have installed):

    image

    To fix this issue with the IIS 6 Management tool:  On the TFS Application Tier server, navigate to the IIS Manager, Default Web Site.  Right click on the ‘ScrumforTeamSystem’ application and click on Properties.  On the Directory Security tab, click Edit within the ‘Authentication and access control’ region.  Untick ‘Enable anonymous access’ and tick ‘Integration Windows authentication’.  Press OK on all dialogs.

    clip_image002[4]

    We will be making a fix to a future version the installer to set this explicitly but we wanted to get the information out there now so people with this issue can set things up correctly.

    The second issue is that when you have a remote WSS/MOSS set up, you cannot access the Report List in a Team Project created by Scrum for Team System v2.x.  Instead you receive a message as follows:

    clip_image002[10]

    The reason for this in most cases is that the TFS Report List web part hosted within MOSS/WSS relies on passing through the user authentication to the Reporting Services server (typically hosted on the TFS App Tier).  In a dual app-tier environment where MOSS or WSS is on a separate server, this means that Kerberos delegation must be configured, as NTLM authentication does not allow you to make cross machine calls as that user once authenticated.

    As a domain administrator, using the “Active Directory Users and Computers” tool on a domain controller, find the MOSS/TFS server in the AD, and in the Properties > Delegation tab, select ‘Trust this computer for delegation to any service (Kerberos only).  Your own network policies may dictate a finer set of delegation settings than listed here.

    clip_image002[14]


    No restart of any services should be required by this change.  Refresh the Team Project portal page in your browser.

    Once this step has been completed you may encounter a message similar to the following:

    clip_image002[12]

    If this is the case, it is most likely that the permissions to browse the reports have not been set correctly.  Please visit the Microsoft documentation on this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb558971.aspx and follow the instructions “To add a member to the Browser group in Reporting Services”.

    If symptoms persist, you can review the Scrum for Team System support forum at http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/forum to see if your issue has been resolved there, or raise a new topic there.

  • Windows 7 Beta and the National Rail Enquiries Gadget

    Well it’s only been a few days since Windows 7 Beta became publicly available and I’ve already received quite a few messages from people attempting to run the National Rail Enquiries Vista Gadget on it and being presented with the following instead of the gadget:

    image

    I’ve attached to this post a zip file containing a refreshed gadget until National Rail Enquiries update the gadget themselves.

    For those technically minded, the problem seems to be resolved by removing ;charset=UTF-8 from the following line found in each html file within the gadget – which lets the rest of the script execute correctly: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

  • Windows Server “Core” SP2 will support .NET Framework and ASP.NET

    I remember attending the keynote at TechEd 2007 and being disappointed that ASP.NET applications will not run on Windows Server “Core” 2008.

    Well today I’m happy to learn that ASP.NET and a “subset of .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5” (whatever that means) will be optional components in Windows Server 2008 R2.

    See http://blogs.technet.com/server_core/archive/2008/11/13/server-core-changes-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx for more information.

  • Team Foundation Error: Windows Live Messenger is not running.

    If you have installed the October 2008 TFS Power Tools (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBD14EEA-781F-45A1-8C46-9F6BA2F68BF0&displaylang=en) and you are running the latest Windows Live Messenger Beta (http://download.live.com/messenger), you may come across the following error when opening Team Explorer:

    image 

    Using the trusty Process Monitor to look for evidence of what the power tool is doing, we can see by filtering on devenv.exe that some calls are made to the registry to determine if MSN Messenger is “up and running”.

    image

    Looking in the registry path specified (HKCU\Software\IM Providers\MSN Messenger\UpAndRunning) and watching it whilst WLM Beta is restarted, it seems that this value is sometimes not updated by the Beta version of Windows Live Messenger and the value stays at 0.  This is likely to be some sort of bug with the WLM Beta however it seems to only occur randomly.  Setting the UpAndRunning value to 2 and refreshing Team Explorer resolves the issue.

  • Test your web design in different browsers - for free

    Whilst surfing this morning I found this website: http://browsershots.org 

    "Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here."

    Once you've submitted the site, you can view the results as they come in, and download all the screenshots in a single file.  Very neat.

    image

    image

  • MSBuild Project Template v2.0

    Last year I created an MSBuild Project Template that lets you work with Source Control (e.g. Team Foundation Server) and decent syntax highlighting by default when using MSBuild proj files.  It was fairly well received and I finally got time today to implement a couple of the suggestions that have come up in the intervening 8 months.

    I've uploaded the resulting template to http://www.codeplex.com/MSBuildTemplate

    The major changes are as follows:

    • The source code to a HelloWorld custom task is now included instead of the pre-built task.
    • I've changed the debugging parameters so that you can step through custom tasks by putting breakpoints in.
    • The template dynamically generates the reference to the task binary based on the ProjectName specified.

    Usage is just as before, first of all download the project template from here http://www.codeplex.com/MSBuildTemplate, then drop the entire zip file into your Documents\Visual Studio 200x\Templates\ProjectTemplates folder (don't expand it!!!).  Restart Visual Studio and create a new project.  You should see the "MSBuild Project" template appear under My Templates.

    image

    Once you have created a new Project (and Solution if necessary), your solution will be structured like this:

     image 

    Pressing F5 will compile the Custom Task and start the MSBuild.exe (v2.0) with the Build.proj as its parameter.  The custom task can be debugged directly from the IDE.  Set a breakpoint within the task and start debugging to see what I mean.

    image

    As before, please leave comments for improvements on this site or on the Codeplex site.

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I have now left EMC Consulting and can be found at http://stuartpreston.net
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