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Though not really mentioned in the keynote there are a lot of sessions on VSTS 2010 at the PDC; it is going to be a major really major release. Chatting in between the sessions with other delegates there seems to loads of interest in the new testing features, but we know this is pain point from Alt.net meetings. It will be interesting to see how these new tools deliver, I am sure the manual testing tools will be useful, but I am a bit more doubtful over the UI testing tools. We have all seen the demo promise of these products before and hit problems when we try to use them for real. ...

So it seems we are going to have themed days at the 2008 PDC and day one is all about the Azure services platform. Though judging by the expo stands the key announcements for tomorrow - Oslo and Dublin are out there too. As conferences go it seems a bit confused to me, I guess Microsoft are aiming for three big bangs at three keynotes; but we seem to have had a big bang today and splutter of future items. ...

I won’t repeat Robert’s blog entry on the Black Marble founders reunion, but just to add the missing photo

I got this error when installing TFS 2008. In the error log I could see the problem was when the TfsGssInit.exe was run, it said Detailed Message: TF213000: A required user account could not be added during installation or repair of Team Foundation Server. The installation or repair failed with the following exception message: System.TypeInitializationException….. I found the answer in the TFS forum. The thread (and others) did suggest there were DNS lookup issues, but the thing that got it for me was removing VS2008 Team Client (and it’s SP1) from the server. I had installed these whilst I had been waiting for the IT department do some work in the SQL Data Tier. I thought I was saving times, I was wrong!. ...

Whilst doing a new TFS 2008 dual tier install I was getting a failure with a TF220050 error when I entered the data tier DB instance name. The setup wizard just said ‘failed to connect to data tier’, but you can find the actual error number in the install logs to be found under C:Documents and Settings[setup user]Local SettingsTemp This error seems to be just a generic low level ‘cannot connect to the DB’; in my case it was caused by one of two issues: ...

So that took about 6 hours by my estimation. Popular or what!

Ian Cooper has just announced that you can now register for DDD7, but be quick it is expected to be full in 24 hours.

I have been working on site that has had to do a disaster recovery of their TFS application tier (AT) due to hardware failure. For a short period they have had to use a spare PC as their AT. Due to the hast required to get the developers working this AT was only configured to for source control and work item editing. So I was onsite to put the proper replacement AT in place. All seemed to go OK until we added a new Iteration to a team project. It did not appear in the IterationPath field for work items. ...

I installed the TFS 2008 SP1 on a site that was using custom accounts for the identities that run the application pools for the WSS instance and Report Services. These user accounts got reset back to Network Service when the service pack was installed; I had not see this occur on any site I had upgraded previously. This meant you could not start WSS or Reporting Services. Manually resetting them back to their old correct accounts fixed the problem. ...

The recent release of the MSBuild Extensions includes a task for StyleCop 4.3. I have been trying to get this integrated into our TFS TeamBuild, I think it is a far more preferable way to do it than editing the various project files in our solution to link in StyleCop as you had to do in 4.2. There are a good few steps I had to follow to get it doing: Install the StyleCop 4.3 Msi ...