Whilst seting up a Release Management 2015.1 server we came across a strange problem. The installation appears to go OK. We were able to install the server and from the client created a simple vNext release pipeline and run it. However, the release stalled on the ‘Upload Components’ step.
Looking in event log of the VM running the Release Management server we could see many many errors all complaining about invalid XML, all in the general form
Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.: rnrn at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.Model.SystemSettings.LoadXml(Int32 id)
Note: The assembly that it complaining about varied, but all Release Management Deploayer related.
We tried a reinstall on a new server VM, but got the same results.
Turns out issue was due to the service account that the Release Management server was running as; this was the only thing common between the two server VM instances. We swapped to use ‘Network Server’ and everything lept into life. All we could assume was that some group policy or similar settings on the service account was placing some restriction on assembly or assembly config file loading.