"You are not logged into Windows Live Messenger"

After a user (a business representative user) installed the October Power Tools, they started getting a message saying "Team Foundation Error: You are not logged into Windows Live Messenger" when opening VS.NET 2008 Team Explorer.

I didn't look into it much (too many other things going on), but I guess these steps fixed it (or disabled whatever was causing the issue).

1. Open VS 2008 and wait until Team Members is not "working..."
2. Right-click on it and select Personal Settings
3. Under Collaboration, click Change
4. On the opened dialog select None and click OK
5. Click OK once again

I got them from this forum page.

Team Explorer and Teamprise Date format difference

So I'm writing this extension for Anthill Open Source so that Anthill can talk to TFS from a Unix/Linux machine. We still have a need for Anthill and it was requested of me by our testers. I did the same for Windows months ago and it has worked remarkably well. See my previous posting on where to get the code. I only mention "remarkably well" as there is probably a good reason why I don't develop much software; I was never very good at it.

The Window's adapter uses tf.exe which is provided by Microsoft. The Unix/Linux version uses Teamprise. Both command lines work well for what Anthill needs to do.

In Anthill there is logic where it will check to see when the last code change was and compare it with the last successful build Anthill has recorded. If there is a change AFTER Anthill's last successful build, a build will fire off. If there is NOT a change, the build will not run. Very nice feature that I think Team Build will have in TFS 2008. If not, my colleague wrote a program that does this for us in Team Build 2005 and we can just apply the concept to Team Build 2008.

Back to Anthill. What we do is run a history command to get back the "Date" of the most current changeset on a particular folder. Tf.exe gives us back the format "Wednesday, May 23, 2007 4:25:41 PM" which translates into a SimpleDateFormat of "EEEE, MMMM d, yyyy h:mm:ss aa". Teamprise on the other hand, returns "May 23, 2007 5:24:39 AM" which translates into a SimpleDateFormat of "MMM d, yyyy h:mm:ss aa". This causes a cross platform issue as the SimpleDateFormat is used for the compare with Anthill's last successful build.

I've modified our code to account for the difference and will be posting it back up to Anthill OS as soon as we have it fully tested. I doubt many people will have an issue like this, but if you are depended on the "Date" format coming from Team Explorer and Teamprise, note they are slightly different.

A scare when changing workspace mappings

Here is a good way to scare even the most seasoned developer.

• Set your workspace U000001-XPA mapping so $/TeamProject/MySource is pulled down to c:\MySource
  
• Check out $/TeamProject/MySource/MyFile.cs to c:\MySource\MyFile.cs
  
• Make a change to MyFile.cs, but do not check in.
  
• Now let's say for some reason you want to get the code $/TeamProject/MySource to c:\MyTempSource. To do so you decide to change workspace U000001-XPA mapping so $/TeamProject/MySource is pulled down to c:\MyTempSource.
  
• Do a Get Latest.
  
• Open up My Computer and you should see code under c:\MyTempSource. And you should notice that all code, including the code that was checked out and changed!, is deleted from MySource.
  
• Start freaking out.
  

This just happened to one of our tech leads. Luckily he checked in the code before running through these steps. So he felt alright, but did have me over to his desk to take a look and see if it's correct behavior. I didn't think it was and did some testing.

Well good news. Team Explorer and Teamprise are smart enough to move the changes under the new mapping location. In our case. c:\MyTempSource. In addition, Team Explorer and Teamprise are smart enough to not delete any files that were in the original location (i.e. c:\MySource), but NOT added to the list of pending changes.

I think this is correct behavior, but it does scare us a bit.