September TFS Powertool released!

September version (1.3) of the Power Tool for TFS 2005 is now available for download.

This release includes new features:

• Team Foundation Server Best Practice Analyzer: This tool helps a TFS Administrator gather configuration information about TFS deployment, perform tests on a server, analyze test results and more. In addition, this tool can be used to perform these tasks:
  • Determine configurations that differ from default, recommended, or required settings.
  • Verify a TFS deployment is configured according to recommended best practices.
• WorkItem templates: supports the ability to create, apply, capture, and set default work item templates. Templates can be used to create or update work items, and they can automatically set field values.

This release is only compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. Visual Studio 2008 support planned for release in few months.

For more details, check out Brian Harry's post.

Moving TFS Databases to new destination

Last week I installed Team Foundation Server (single server mode) for one of our customers. Due to hardware problem, I installed TFS on default drive C which has low capacity: ~50GB space.

After couple of days the customer installed another hard disk (160GB). He asked me to move TFS databases to the new hard disk.

These are the steps I used to move the TFS databases from drive C to the new hard disk.

Preparations

1. Ask the users (and make sure...) to stop working against TFS.
2. Backup TFS database or make sure you have access to the daily backups. (you won't use it; just in case...)

Workaround

1. Stop TFSServerScheduler, SharePoint Timer Service & SQL Server Reporting services.
2. Stop the TFS-related Application Pools:  ReportServer, TFS AppPool, TFSWSS, and TFSWSSADMIN. (You can also stop IIS if it isn't being used for anything else).
3. Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the Database Engine for your Team Foundation Server.
4. Locate and Detach the TFS databases:
• ReportServer
• ReportServerTempDB
• STS_Config_TFS
• STS_Content_TFS
• TfsActivityLogging
• TfsBuild
• TfsIntegration
• TfsVersionControl
• TFSWarehouse
• TfsWorkItemTracking
• TfsWorkItemTrackingAttachements
5. Locate the database data files and transaction logs that were detached.  By default they are in the following directory: [C]:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data.  The following database files should be moved:
• ReportServer.mdf and ReportServer_log.LDF
• ReportServerTempDB.mdf and ReportServerTempDB_log.LDF
• STS_Config_TFS.mdf and STS_Config_TFS_log.LDF
• STS_Content_TFS.mdf and STS_Content_TFS_log.LDF
• TfsActivityLogging.mdf and TfsActivityLogging_log.LDF
• TfsBuild.mdf and TfsBuild_log.LDF
• TfsIntegration.mdf and TfsIntegration_log.LDF
• TfsVersionControl.mdf and TfsVersionControl_log.LDF
• TFSWarehouse.mdf and TFSWarehouse_log.LDF
• TfsWorkItemTracking.mdf and TfsWorkItemTracking_log.LDF
• TfsWorkItemTrackingAttachments.mdf and TfsWorkItemTrackingAttachments_log.LDF
6. For each database, move the MDF and related LDF file from the source location to the new database files destination.
7. On Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio reattach the database files that you moved in the previous step to their new locations.
8. Restart the application pools that were shutdown in step 2 (or restart IIS).
9. Start the services that were stopped in step 1.
10. Open Team Explorer and make sure everything works well.

Good luck!

Problems after installation TFS SP1 on Application Tier with Dual TFS Installation

Hello, everyone!

If you install TFS SP1 on Application Tier on Dual TFS Installation and you receive error like:

"Team Foundation Server does not exist or is not accessible at this time. Http code 503 :TF30059 : Fatal error while initializing web service "

Don't be alarm :-), you just have to install TFS SP1  on Data Tier too.

TFS and QualityCenter

Earlier this year we've blogged about the TFS-TestDirector tool that we released. As a result of customer needs we had to update the solution and create a sync mechanism that works with both TestDirector and QualityCenter. Since we had this need in mind on the first place, our architecture supported the extension and we could accomplish the challenge quite simply. The challenging part was working with APIs and documentation that was not created on a Microsoft shop and is not as pampering as we are used too...

We are now implementing the solution on two customer sites and hope that in the very near future could bring you their point of view and conclusions.

Eclipse and VSTS

Access to Team System source control and work item tracking is available to java developers using Eclipse.
The Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse integrates with TFS team explorer and access to team projects.

Building .NET 3.0 projects from Team Foundation Build 2005 not supported

Building .NET 3.0/3.5 projects from Team Foundation Build 2005 not supported. Team Foundation Build 2005 will always invoke the 2.0 Framework's MSBuild.exe, which does not support building solutions that target the 3.5 Framework.  (The 3.0 Framework shipped with Vista, while the 3.5 Framework is shipping with VS 2008.)

The 3.5 Framework includes new MSBuild bits which allow multi-targeting - i.e. MSBuild 3.5 can target the 2.0 Framework.

We can convert our solution to VS2008 beta 2 and target the solution to .NET framework 2.0. It's not enough. When we'll try to build this solution with Team Foundation Build 2005, we'll get an error MSB5014 - File format version is not recognized.

The MSBuild blog has great post about MSBuild, Orcas, and Multi-targeting. Find it here.

SqlBuildTask timeout

I built a big DB Dude project from MSBuild command line and got a timeout error.

MSBUILD : Build error TSD158: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

The default timeout for query execution is 60 seconds and stored in the registry. We can extend the query timeout by changing these values. The registry entries are:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\DBPro\Database\QueryTimeoutSeconds

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\DBPro\Database\LongRunningQueryTimeoutSeconds