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I am sitting on the train heading north. After deciding trying to stream the England/Wales match from iPlayer on the train WiFi was probably not a good idea, especially after just reading the score, I though I should write about the Alt.Net UK Conference; a very interesting experience. It is great to meet so many people who are so enthusiastic over their jobs and learning how to do it better. There were some faces I knew from DDD and other community events, but also many new faces. I was surprised by the distance some people had travelled, I met a good few from around Europe, but I think Roy won the prize with a trip from Israel. ...

It seems there are still some places left for SQLBits II in Birmingham on the 1st of March. If you want to go I suggest you register fast as these community events do fill up fast.

I enjoyed presenting on TFS at the inaugural meeting of the Peterborough VBug group last night. Thanks to Jyoti Majithia (VBug regional administrator) and Andy Westgarth (VBug chairman) for organising it. Hopefully this will be the start of another thriving user group community. If anyone wants a copy of the slide stack, there were no major changes between the one I used last night and the DDD5 one our main web site. There is also a screencast of demo of eScrum in the same archive. ...

A while ago I made the classic mistake of installing the Beta2 of TFS on our live servers after seeing posts that it was reliable enough for production use. I had stupidly assumed that there would be an upgrade path to the RTM; there usually is from the last beta, but not this time. TIP: Don’t ever do this yourself, only use beta’s in places you can throw them away without any issues. ...

Just heard my session Development Life Cycle using Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Professionals has been accepted for SQLBits II on the 1st of March in Birmingham. Thanks to everyone who voted for it, and I hope to see you there. 

I have been debugging some SharePoint 2007 webparts and have had to resort to TRACE output and the SysInternal DebugView; it is like ASP pages in the 90s all over again! Anyway had a weird problem that only alternate TRACE.WriteLine commands were appearing in the view. I have not found a reason why or a solution as yet, I suspect a buffer flushing issue, but you can work round it once you know it is happening. ...

If you run the 2008 Power Tools BPA against a TFS 2008 install that has the 2005 Team Explorer also installed on it you will get virtually no reports generated. It runs to completion but the reports are empty. This is due to some clash between the BPA and the TFS 2005 DLLs (V8.0). Removed the 2005 Team Explorer and it works as expected. Now you are probably asking why would I have 2005 Team Explorer on a 2008 install? It is because a number of the third party TFS add-ins, such as eScrum, require the 2005 DLLs either to install or to run. As in theory the 2005 and 2008 installs are site side by side so it should not be an issue - but it is for the BPA. ...

I will be doing a TFS and Continuous Integration session for Scottish Developers on the 12th of February

Whilst installing a TFS & CCNet demo system I got an exception System.Security.SecurityException: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers when I tried to load the CCNet WebDashboard. The problem was that default CCNet installer had created the WebDashboard on the default web site as the virtual directory http://localhost/ccnet As this was also a TFS server the default web site was a WSS3 server. Bascially the SharePoint did not like (trust) the CCNet virtual directory’s DLLs. ...

I was installing a Dual Tier Team Foundation Server 2008 at a clients today and got a problem that when installing the Application Tier (AT) I entered the name of the Data Tier server (DT) and it said the server could not be found. Unlike TFS 2005, 2008 does not require you to to do a separate install on the DT to create the empty DBs, so I assumed it was just a connectivity problem. However there was none to be found, so I checked the detailed TFS install error log and saw I had a TS220066 error that also mentioned SQLRS - I guessed at a reporting services issue. ...