Using $(WebProjectOutputDir) in the *.csproj file's PostBuildEvent

A colleague of mine wanted to add a PostBuildEvent in their *.csproj file which would run a custom executable to create generated java script files.

The change (see BEFORE below) worked locally as the path they wanted the generated was $(ProjectDir) which mapped to the .\Sources directory on the build machine and their locally directory within their IDE. The issue was, we needed the generated files to be under .\Binaries on the build machine which didn't exist on their machine. More specifically, we needed this generated file created under $(OutDir)_PublishedWebsites\$(MSBuildProjectName) on the build machine which translates to .\Binaries\_PublishedWebsites\$(MSBuildProjectName).

What we ended up doing was, instead of using the $(Outdir) property, we used the $(WebProjectOutputDir) which was set in the $(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file. Using this value allows the output directories to be correctly set on both the build machine (where we want to use .\Binaries) and $(ProjectDir) where we want to use the locally structure.

BEFORE:
"$(TargetDir)JavascriptFromMvcRoutes.exe" "$(TargetDir)$(TargetFileName)" "$(ProjectDir)js\Generated.js"

AFTER:
"$(TargetDir)JavascriptFromMvcRoutes.exe" "$(TargetDir)$(TargetFileName)" "$(WebProjectOutputDir)js\Generated.js"

TSWA Profile > Options Not Staying

A colleague of mine tracked down an issue where all users' TSWA Profile > Options were not staying after they closed the browser. For example, a user would change their Theme to Olive, but after they closed their browser it would default back to the default.

We're not sure if this is the right fix, but we had to change permissions on the D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team System Web Access\Web folder so that "Users" had Modify permissions. Users are now able to change their Options and they stick.

Question Marks "?" on files in Teamprise

A colleague of mine summoned me over to his desk. He had question marks "?" on all the files he checked out from the Teamprise Plug-in and was wondering why.

Typically I see files with question marks on them when the user has changed the file permissions without checking the file out. Teamprise, not knowing what the status of the file is (as I would expect), labels the file with a small question mark indicating that something has changed, but its not sure what. Or something like that.

However, in this case the user had promised me the files were checked out. He had the Pending Changes to prove it.

I did a quick search and after digging through a couple of my old posts, I found Martin's post Teamprise V2 Preview 2 where he discusses better off-line support. It's here he states "When you next connect, all the read/write files will have a little question mark on them inside Eclipse."

Now the user is using Teamprise 3.0, but my thought is this "question mark" behavior was not changed until 3.1, which by the way is what I’m using. He's been having a number of network issues so my guess is that his network connection was dropped thus resulting in Teamprise 3.0 to go into "off-line" mode. Once he was back online, he would have needed to run "Team > Synchronize" to synch back up with the server. This is exactly what we did and the question marks were changed back into check-marks indicating check out.

I couldn't reproduce this as I think Teamprise changed the behavior in 3.1. If I get sometime next week, I'm going to rollback my Teamprise version to 3.0, check out some files, drop my network connection and see if I can reproduce the error. Or more likely, simply upgrade him to 3.1!

Bug in TFS 2008: "TF50605: There was an error looking up the SID for "

Here is a Bug we found in TFS 2008. At least I think it's a Bug. It happens when you try to delete (or perform other workspace actions) on a workspace owned by a user who no longer is in Active Directory.

1) Create an AD account and use it to log into TFS 2008, create workspaces and check out files.

2) Then, leaving some files checked out such, delete the account in AD. This is what happens when someone leaves your company.

3) Go back to TFS and try to delete their workspace. E.g. tf workspace /delete /server:http://tfs.int.mycompany.com:8080 Z055638-XPA;Z055638 *where Z055638 is the user who left the company.

4) You should get the error "TF50605: There was an error looking up the SID for Z055638" which to me means since the account can't be found in AD (the user left the company) you can't delete their workspace and thus can't "undo" any files they have checked out.

To resolve this, we had to manually update the TfsVersionControl, Tbl_Workspace table. Cameron Vetter's post gave us the idea. We changed the OwerId field to a valid user for that workspace. The we were able to delete it.

Not ideal, but worked for us. I've submitted this to Connect as well.

"Waiting for version updates to finish..."

Last week we noticed a colleague's Teamprise hanging at the end of a Get Latest Version. The message was something along the line of "Waiting for version updates to finish...". Unfortunately on my local machine, everything worked as expected. Typical I guess.

Anyway, I was playing around with the VPC image developers (and the person having trouble) use and noticed that *.tfs.mycompany.com* was not listed in the Eclipse proxy exclusion list. It is my belief, if *.tfs.mycompany.com* is not added, you'll also get the strange "Waiting for version updates to finish..." behavior, and possibly other network related issues. In addition, Teamprise has a good article titled TKB00021 Diagnosing Common Connection Problems that also provides help with connection issues.

To properly set your proxy settings in Eclipse, you can go to Window > Preferences > General > Network Connections and add *.tfs.mycompany.com* to your "No Proxy for:" host list. There is also a short cut in Teamprise if you hit a wall during the initial Import.

Why some files don't get pushed to TFS drop location.

Yesterday I got a question about why *.dat files were not being added to the ./Binaries folder during a Team Build, and thus not pushed to the TFS drop location. The *.dat files are used by a third party software we use to track browser requests.

After digging around a bit, we found that the *.dat files were added to the .NET 3.5 C# web project with the element <None. Other files part of this third party were added as <Content.

...
<Content Include="Views\Browse\ItemControl.ascx" />
<None Include="bin\bhawk_sp.dat" />
...

A very intellectual developer in our group (not me) found out that the *.dat files were added with "Build Action" defaulted to None. To change this, I believe he Right Clicked on the file > Properties > and changed the Build Action to Content.



Now the *.dat files get copied over to the ./Binaries directory and pushed to the Drop Location.

Analysis Services hung on Data Tier

While looking at our TFS 2008 Data Tier today I noticed that the msmdsrv.exe resource (i.e. Analysis Services) was using 99% of the Data Tier CPU. I knew that when the OLAP processing happened, the Data Tier process would spike. But this spike was consistent. Something was wrong.

When running the GetWarehouseStatus web service (i.e. http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx?op=GetWarehouseStatus) we got "ProcessingOlap". Typically this takes a minute or two for us. Oddlly, we were getting this status for over an hour (though I'm sure it was happening for a while longer than that).

We figured the process was hung and wanted to restart it. We have about 150 users on the system so we didn’t want to recycle IIS as it would drop users. So instead of recycling IIS on the App Tier, we shut down the Analysis Service on the Data Tier. This brought the Data Tier CPU usage back to normal.

Then to test things out, we invoked the data warehouse update (using the Run web service). When the OLAP processing ran, the Data Tier process neared 100% a number of times (as expected). After about a minute, the process finished and the Data Tier was back in good standing.

We're not sure what to take away from this, but it's something we'll have to monitor.

Odd Security issue on Windows 2008 Server running IIS 7.0

To be honest, I can't make sense of this error or it's resolution. However, I wanted to write it down incase we ever run across it again.

My project team has the first Windows 2008 servers in the data center. This means that if something goes wrong, everyone gets to stair back at us saying "why in the heck did you guys adopt this new OS so fast." And true to form, something did go wrong. We started getting the error "The server encountered an error processing the request. The exception message is 'Access is denied.'" when performing some actions (of which I'm not 100% sure as another sub-group wrote the code) in a Web Service running under IIS 7.0.

We knew this had to be some kind if security issue so we went through the standard steps. Oddly enough, our Data Center contact (who is a Microsoft Wizard) stumbled on a resolution where he added "Network Service" to the local Administrators group (this was a last resort). As we kind of expected, this resolved the error. He then removed "Network Service," as having it in the local Administrator group would be stupid, and rebooted. We expected the error to come back. Nope, that seemed to fix "it." We repeated this on one other machine and magically it fixed it as well.

We're not sure why this works. We continue to laugh about it and just hang our heads low.

The server encountered an error processing the request. The exception message is 'Access
is denied.'. See server logs for more details. The exception stack trace is:
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.SyncMethodInvoker.Invoke(Object instance, Object
[] inputs, Object[]& outputs)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.InvokeBegin(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage5(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage4(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage3(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage2(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage1(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.MessageRpc.Process(Boolean isOperationContextSet)

Bug in TfsAdminUtil Status

While practicing hardware moves for both the App Tier and Data Tier, we're making use of the TfsAdminUtil command. We've had some issues with this tool. Mainly around really bad error message reporting. It seems like you can get the error "ERROR: TF55020: Could not access database." for any number of reasons. No other help is provided (e.g. "Check to make sure the Team Foundation Server App Pools and Site are up and running"). I'll try to gather some of the possible causes and solutions when I get some more time.

While trying to track down the root cause of this error, we made use of the "Status" switch. Below is what came back. You can see that Status says no Windows services are running as our TFSReports account. However, in the window you can see that "SQL Server Reporting Services" most certainly is running as TFSReports. I think this might be a bug in the tool, which given the poor error message handling, would not surprise me.

Ant and TFS 2008

Yesterday estrada pinged me on how we build Java projects in TFS 2008. If you remember, I wrote an article a while back (about a year ago) on how we did it with TFS 2005.

My current group has written a custom MSBuild task to call Ant scripts. I would prefer to use Teamprise Build Extensions, but I joined this group late and they had already had much of the infrastructure written. We do some custom things like write writing Junit tests back to TFS. I don't believe Teamprise Build Extensions has that functionality though I could be wrong.

Anyway, my recommendation for calling Ant scripts with TFS 2008 would be to use Teamprise Build Extensions. The setup instructions are great and it's a nice, easy, way to get setup and running.

Let me know how it goes!