Brian H. Madsen - .Net Powered by Caffeine : Team Foundation Server

New TFS site dedicated to working with the TFS API - via Charles Stirling

Brian Madsen — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:44:00 GMT

Once you've worked for a while with Team Foundation Server, you'll most likely find that you need to do something that's not out-of-the-box - so what do you do and how do you do it?

In most cases you'll have to work with the TFS API - where to get info?

Enter stage left - Charles Sterling informs us that there's a new site out there dedicated to the TFS API.

The site is run by newly awarded MVP Jeff Bramwell and it's a community driven site - from what i can see then it's possible for you, the community, to contribute to the growing number of tips and tricks.

There's already a number of examples available up there - time to contribute guys!!

Team System Web Access error - Client found response content type of '', but expected 'text/xml'. The request failed with an empty response.

Brian Madsen — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

For a while i've been battling with a little annoying error in Team System Web Access (formerly known as TeamPlains) and the fix was hard to locate, but easy to implement.

The error i was getting in the Reports tab in Team System Web Access was this:

Client found response content type of '', but expected 'text/xml'. The request failed with an empty response.

I got no other indication of what the error was so i started to look around for it. Primarly, the error would come up IF permissions hadn't been set up properly in the reports administration console on Reporting Server. So that was the first instance to check out - ensure that the user permissions were correct. Yes, the account which was used had Content Manager AND System Administrator access to the reports. So far so good - note - in many instances you can have problems if your reporting server is NOT located on the SQL Server box and in some cases you'll need to implement kerberos as the authentication, though for my problem that wasn't a fix.

The environment I've set up is as follows:

Windows Server 2008 64-bit running SQL Server 2008 (configured with full text search and SSIS)
Windows Server 2008 64-Bit running Reporting Server
Windows Server 2008 64-bit running Microsoft Office SharedPoint Server (MOSS) 2007
Windows Server 2008 64-bit running a Web Front End for the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007
Virtualised Windows Server 2003 32-bit running Team Foundation Server 2008 (App Tier) and Team System Web Access

Initially I wanted to run another Windows Server 2008 64-Bit for the Team Foundation Server, but that's currently not supported so i virtualised the server instead (which imho is a good move anyways)

Some of the errors i found in the log file on the Reporting Server was:

Query execution failed for dataset 'WorkItemTestResults'
DataPrefetch abort handler called for Report with ID=. Aborting data sources ..
Data source 'TfsOlapReportDS': Report processing has been aborted.
AdomdErrorResponseException: Query (22, 9) The set must have a single hierarchy to be used with the complement operator.

None of those seemed in any way helpful - so i turned to some outside help and got Aaron Block [MSFT PM for Team System] and the brilliant guys from OZTFS (TFS mailing list run by Readify and managed by Mitch Denny, thanks guys - www.oztfs.com) and it was mentioned that SP1 may, or may not, have been applied across the entire range of products properly. So i set out to ensure that all clients and servers had SP1 installed.

Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 - Check
Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - ahhh...not all instances, fix == add SP1
Team System Web Access - check...or rather, v9.0..which is NOT SP1

Ok, we seemed to have made some headway with this one - SP1 should definitely be applied to TSWA, but no SP1 installer, only a full install which contains SP1 - namely version 9.1. Uninstall TSWA v9.0, and install TSWA 9.1 (SP1) and voila the Reports now show up in TSWA's Reports tab.

Second problem i was battling, and still am, is that the Team Foundation Server 2008 SharePoint Extensions x64 Power Tool keeps failing to install. It would "nearly" complete, then stop and roll back - problem was, that the system noted that it was installed but a lot of features were missing (such as tfsredirect.aspx and the templates) - easy part was to get hold of tfsredirect.aspx - simply just open up the LAYOUTS folder and grab it BEFORE you close down the installer. Copy it to another folder.

The problem with the templates seemed to be the wrong version. you can apply a WSS 2.0 template to the templates directory on MOSS, but you can't use it for anything. MOSS wont run WSS 2.0 templates it seems. Another search got me a zip file which included WSS 3.0 templates (MSF Agile and MSF CMMI) - added those manually and dropped the tfsredirect.aspx file back into the LAYOYTS folder and i was running again.

I've attached the download i got with the templates.

Anyways, big problem (eg. its not werkin'!!) but simple solution - check TSWA version and grab the zip file.

Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk

Brian Madsen — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:50:11 GMT

I don't know how often i've had to delay playing with a new piece of released technology, just because I was in the middle of another set of tests and simply didn't have the time to create my own virtual server environment again to accommodate the platform i want to test.

Here's a bit of good news - Microsoft VHD (www.microsoft.com/vhd) is a set of virtual hard disks available for download which already has the necessary bits installed.

Currently there's a range of virtuals available:

Biztalk Server 2006	System Center Essentials 2007
Exchange Server 2007	System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007
Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2	Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
ISA Server 2006	Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional	Windows Server 2008 Beta 3
Office Sharepoint Server 2007	Windows Server 2003 R3
SQL Server 2005	Windows Vista
SQL Server 2005/Exchange 2007

Just download either Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 (which is free btw), and you're ready to go!

Ozzie Rules Blogging : One of the Team Foundation Server program managers is coming to Australia

Brian Madsen — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:54:26 GMT

Chuck posted on his blog that Joe Schwertz is coming to Australia and will be touring client sites as well as the UGs around.

How awesome would it be to get him over here to the west and show us what TFS is really about?

Send me an email if you want me to petition Chuck to try and get him over...Or just simply comment here and i'm sure Chuck will eventually read about it...

Ozzie Rules Blogging : One of the Team Foundation Server program managers is coming to Australia

New idea - let readers suggest a topic to be covered

Brian Madsen — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:43:00 GMT

Sometimes you can get rather frustrated, that the exact scenario you're trying to solve a problem with, isn't documented on MSDN - or you end up finding 100s of tutorials which never really works in your case.

So, why not try something new - suggest a topic and i'll write up an article/tutorial/solution for it.

very simple - just bear in mind that i don't have unlimited resources at my disposal so i cant set up an enterprise environment, running a specific ERP together with a cluster of Oracle or SQL Servers.

also, please don't suggest anything even remotely related to MONO, MySQL or something that even touches on any Linux flavour...i left that world behind many years ago and i'm not going back.

To be on the same page - i'll list the platforms:

.Net
C#
.NET
SQL Server
.NET
Visual Studio
.Net

That pretty much sums it up...

I've put up a page for suggestions here

First request has come through - How to validate fields in a GridView.

Now i'm pretty sure there's other examples out there for this, but it's a place to start.

Note: Due to the high amount of spam directed at this post - i have disabled comments from it - if you have any questions or suggestions please just forward me an email through the contact section.

Team Foundation Server - Aussie mailing list

Brian Madsen — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:36:00 GMT

David Lemphers was again a source of knowledge - well, he spreads the word like a bushfire out of control..

on his blog he just informed "us" about a new mailing list - OzTFS.com which is definitely a gift from heaven for those who's having problems with TFS.

Again, excellent work David..thumbs up!

Before i forget - the list was set up by Grant Holiday, from Readify