Today I tried to add a user to an existing TFS Team project, this user had happily been working on other team projects hosted on the same same server. In theory all I had to do was add the AD user to an existing AD group that was already setup as a contributor to the team project I now wanted them to work on. However when I did this I got the error “TF14044: Access Denied: User DomainNameusername needs the CREATE_PROJECTS global permission(s)” when they tried to load the Source Code Explorer tab in VS2005. Basically they could not see any files or the directory containing them. ...

I am doing some work at present where I need to debug into webparts hosted in a MOSS 2007 server. Never an easy set of debugging to get right. To try to ease the process I wrote a WinForm test application that just calls the webpart method with test parameters so I don’t have to go through all the pages I normally would to get to the feature I need, or manually have to attach the debugger to the Sharepoint web process every time. ...

The proposed session list for SQLBits (to be held on the 6th Oct at Microsoft TVP) has been published. If you don’t know, SQLBits is a free community conference in the style of DDD, but on just SQL related topics. Just like DDD all the speakers are volunteers and the attendees get to vote on the sessions they would like to see. So if you have any interested in SQL, or as Anders Hejlsberg said at a LINQ session I saw ‘if you are a developer who uses data’, why not register and vote for what you would like to see. ...

I tried to install Visual Studio Beta 2 from an ISO today using the Virtual CD Rom tool. This mounted the ISO fine as drive Z: but when I ran the setup.exe I got an error that it could not load the SITSetup.dll, even though this was in the ISO. I copied the contents of the ISO to my physical disk and reran the setup and all was OK, so the tip is mounted ISO don’t always work as you expect. ...

I tried to create a new TFS team project today and got an error that the TFS server could not access the SQL Reporting Services server. I then checked I could access http://myserver/reports and this also failed. On looking in the event log I saw a number of EventID 107 ‘cannot connect to the report server database’ Now I was unsure what could have caused this, it was working last time I created a project! So check the update log on the server and found the only patches that had been applied since I last created a project, and that seemed plausible, were Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (which I thought was already on, but maybe it was just VS TFS SP1) and SQL 2005 SP2. ...

If you are reading Robert’s blog you will know he is in Korea as the mentor of The Seedings, the UK entry for the Microsoft Imagine Cup. I have just seen that the is some video coverage on Microsoft’s Channel8 (which seems to be a Channel9/10 spin off for the Imaging Cup students). Enjoy….. Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup

I was watching the Channel 9 video on the Silverlight game Zero Gravity, the developers said that their aim was to produce an addictive game - they certainly succeeded. This is a great video to watch to get a developers/design view on Silverlight Technorati Tags: Silverlight

Scientific American has a interesting article on a Data Center in a box. Basically it is a standard shipping container full of Sun Servers. I am our our IT manager would like one! it should fit on any house’s driveway, a stylish addition to any home. It is an interesting spin on the old IBM data recovery model where they turned up with a duplicate of your system in a truck in event of a major failure. The key change is it is being sold as a greatly cheaper option than a traditional data center. All it needs is power, a water supply (cooling) and I suppose given our current weather, a location not prone to flooding. ...

I have been having a phase of reading novel’s I read years go, this time it is Neuromancer by William Gibson (published 1984). This choice was triggered by it being reviewed on BBC Radio4’s A Good Read, the suggestion of Bill Thompson the BBC technology columnist. I have been surprised by how little it seems to have dated, ok in places the sizes of data streams and the like seem small (how fast capacity moves on), and maybe the way cyberspace is visualized was nearer the mark of today’s virtual worlds in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (published 1992) but on the whole it seems just as believable as a remember it being when I first read it. Still a worthwhile enjoyable read that has not aged as so much Sci-Fi does. ...

Introduction I said I would post again when I had something to show in my TFS WorkItem webparts project, well here it is. I have created a pair of web parts, one to list all the work items and the other to display the details of a given item. For testing I have create a single ASP.NET 2.0 web page that implements a WebPart manager. This needs to be setup to allow connection between the two WebParts. Note: if you use this sample you will probably have to recreate the connection between the web parts on the test page. Click the edit option (dropdown at top right) for either WebPart and use the connect option. When running it should look like this. ...