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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. ...

After I installed the eScrum template everything seemed fine bar the reports, only the work item report showed anything, in fact on the other reports their parameter combo boxes were empty. The key difference is the workitem report is drawn form the SQL DBs, while all the other reports are drawn from the OLAP warehouse cube. If you connect to the SQL server and run the command select * from dbo._WarehouseConfig where id in (‘LastPRocessTimeStamp’,‘RunIntervalSeconds’) ...

Problem Today I tried to move VS2005 solution in TFS source control from one Source Control location to another (on the same server) as I had put it in a stupid location to start with. So I unbound the source control (File -> Source Control -> Change Source Control) and then went into Source Control Explorer and deleted the directory and then committed the pending delete. This removed the files in the source control BUT ALSO the local ones on my disk, due to the workspace mapping. This was not what I expected, you use source control so you always have copy, a safety net, I had just lost all of my copies by using source control! ...

When developing SharePoint add-in try to remember if you put a previous version of the DLL in the GAC or not. I have just wasted a couple of hours trying to work out why a new version of a DLL is not being read from a site collection’s bin directory, when there was an old version in the GAC. Of course this would not have been an issue if I had been checking the version number properly! A good argument for pair programming to avoid these stupid blind spots ...

I have been looking at writing some SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) web parts to show information about TFS workitems. This turned out to be a bit more complex than expected. I wrote a ASP.NET 2.0 webpart using the TFS WorkItem Tracking Web Project on Codeporject as a starting point. My first WebPart just listed workitems in a project. This went OK and the webpart worked fine in a simple ASP.NET Web Part Manager based test page. ...