I have been working on my DDD6 demo, I intend to show eScrum at end of my session on Scrum. I thought I would use the VPC I had from DDD5, this was based on the TFS Orcas Beta1 and had all the tools I wanted configured. To get some more realistic data in the reports I wanted to leave TFS server running for a week and on a daily basis update the work items as if the project was progressing.

The problem was the underlying operating system evaluation license expired at the start of November. So I tried:

  • a Windows 2K3R2 disk and did an in-place upgrade with a valid key, this seemed to work but when I tried to run any ASP.NET it failed, basically all the rights seemed to be lost
  • tied to force the system to ask for a new key using the KB328874 procedure - this does not work on Windows 2003, just XP it seems, though some web sites seem to say it does work.
  • did a SYSPREP on the server, this allowed me to enter a new key, but after 1 hour I still got the evaluation period expired message - it seems you have to use new media to removed the evaluation time bomb.

So I gave up on that and tried the Visual Studio 2008 TFS Beta2 VPC download. Now installing eScrum on this is not really supported. You have to also install the 2005 Team Foundation Client and some Ajax bits as well as manually replace the SharePoint template using the one provided by John Powell. All seemed good until I tried to add a product backlog item to the sprint on the sprint details page in eScrum where I got loads of JavaScript errors - my guess is some thing was not registered right. Interestingly my ’live’ eScrum, which has been in place upgraded to the Beta2 seems to work OK. Basically I gave up on this VPC, I will wait for a release of eScrum that supports VS2008 for new installs.

So this left me back at a fully working Beta1 VPC that was on an expired OS, or the option to installed a complete new system using VS2005 with ‘real’ licenses, from scratch.

But then I thought about what ’expired’ means for a Windows 2003 evaluation install; it means after 1hr you get a  message the server has expired, and an hour later it restarts. Now this is not much use for any real application, but does all I needed, so I could have saved a good deal of messing around over the past couple of days!

I was still a little worried that the bi-hourly resets may mean the timed jobs that keep the TFS data warehouse up to date might not occur, so I also installed the tool by Eric Lee to allow the update process to be triggered whenever I needed it

So hopefully I now have a system I can build a reasonable demo data set on over days up to DDD6.