Recently the v.1.3 of Team Foundation Power Tools (TFPT) was released. Great pack of utilities while we wait for TFS 2008 where many of the tools are built-in features.

The newest add-ons this time are:

• Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer: great tool for both performing a sanity check on a server before installing TFS as well as a utility for troubleshooting unhealty TFS installations.
• Work Item Templates: a feature that allows commonly used work item forms to be pre-populated with the default values.

I ran the analysis above on our TFS server and fortunately it only returned a couple of minor issues found (like not having the latest quiecense GDR installed). Good for me  

The release can be downloaded here.

Microsoft Sweden has started a series of presentations under the umbrella "application life-cycle management (ALM) called ALM Live. The talks will cover areas like project management, agile development and configuration management and Magnus Juvas kicked it off yesterday with a talk on effective project management. The presentations are of course targeted for Team System and TFS. For the next couple of events I'll be talking about TFS and how use the version control system effectively.

Here's more information about the event at the different locations:

It's going to be a great show this time, lots of good subjects and speakers! This time the major training companies have a chance to join in to show their muscels and I'll be working with Informator to give a talk on how Team System fits well both in a large as well as in a small project. We'll also look at some cool features coming in Visual Studio and TFS 2008 - maybe something about build automation?

More about the event here (including registration of course!).

Just a month after the first beta we've now released beta 2. Most work has been around easier installation and better administration, but a few new features are there as well.

Have a look at it at CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/tfsbuildlab.

Comments and suggenstions are much welcome as always. And please post to the forum as well.

I've added my code for work item screenshot capturing to the WitCustomControls project on CodePlex. I've also added a new control for including a web browser in a work item based on code Naren sent me. Hopefully this project will include more commonly requested control types...and when Team System Web Access will handle custom work item controls this feature will really be useful...

I like Virtual PC and I use it a lot. Recently I decided to rebuild my set of VSTS and TFS images. So I happily created a base image with Windows 2003 Server R2, IIS and Office 2007. This will serve as a good base for the rest of my disks, I thought. Next, I copied the base image to install TFS 2005 on it. I started up the VPC, used NewSID to change the computer Sid and give it a new name. Then I installed TFS and all its prerequisites without any problems. Patched it with service pack 1. Tested according to the doc’s (ran the web service, viewed the report site etc). All is good.

Then I went ahead and created a team project in TFS. Not so good… The project wizard failed with this error when creating the Share Point site:

Error
Unable to connect to the Windows SharePoint Services at TFSDEMO01 

Explanation
The Project Creation Wizard was not able to connect to the Windows SharePoint Services at TFSDEMO01. The reason for the failed connection cannot be determined at this time. Because the connection failed, the wizard was not able to complete creating the Windows SharePoint Services site. 

The project creation log didn’t say much more. The most interesting was the statement before it failed where it verified that the Share Point templates existed (http://tfsdemo01/_vti_bin/Sites.asmx).

Finally, this was logged to the Windows event log:

#50070: Unable to connect to the database STS_Config_TFS on TFSDEMO01.  Check the database connection information and make sure that the database server is running.

Since the errors were unintuitive, I Googled a while, checked permissions, updated the IIS scriptmaps, and checked a good number of other things to find the cause for the error. Nothing. Until I came across this post and it dawned on me. Never install IIS on a VPC image, then change the computer name (or Sid?) and expect IIS to work correctly after. This is probably obvious to everyone... What really fooled me was that IIS responded correctly and the TFS setup went through without an error.

Yesterday, a colleague of mine told me how I could enable hardware virtualization for Virtual PC on my Dell laptop (just enable it in BIOS). Now life is good again.

Microsoft patterns & practices team just released the final 1.0 version of the Team Development with TFS Guide. This PDF book contains lots of useful guides and best-practices, ranging from source code control to build automation to process customization to... Get it here.

Buck Hodges has announced the release of the the Microsoft branded web front-end to Team Foundation Server based on DevBiz Team Plain (which was aquired by Microsoft earlier this year). Brian Harry has written a long post about the history of the product and about the features of this release.

I downloaded the distribution from here and the uninstalled the version of DevBiz Team Plain (2.0 RC) I had installed already. Running the setup after that went fine and after less than 5 minutes total the Visual Studio Team System Web Access was up and running. So far I've seen little differences from the Team Plain version but than again most of the features were already in Team Plain 2.0.