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Whilst creating some custom reports for a client we hit a problem that though the reports worked on my development system and their old TFS server it failed on their new one. The error being that the Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_CompletedWork was an invalid column name Initially I suspected the problem was a warehouse reprocessing issue, but other reports worked so it could not have been that. It must really be the column is missing, and that sort of makes sense. On the new server the team was using the Scrum process template, the Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_CompletedWork and Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_OriginalEstimate fields are not included in this template, the plan had been to add them to allow some analysis of estimate accuracy. This had been done on my development system, but not on the client new server. Once these fields were added to the Task work item the report leapt into life. ...

I have been a long time happy user of Windows Media Center since it’s XP days. My current systems is Windows 8.1 an ATOM based Acer Revo with a pair of USB PCTV Nanostick T2 Freeview HD tuners. For media storage I used a USB attached StarTech RAID disk sub system. This has been working well for a good couple of years, sitting in a cupboard under that stairs. However, I am about to move house and all the kit is going to have to go under the TV. The Revo is virtually silent, but the RAID crate was going to be an issue. It sounds like and aircraft taking off as the disks spin up. ...

Windows 8 store applications need to be built on a TFS build agent running in interactive mode if you wish to run any tests. So whilst rebuilding all our build systems I decided to try to have all the agents running interactive. As we tend to run one agent per VM this was not going to be a major issue I thought. However, whilst testing we found that any of our builds that use the Typemock build activities failed when the build agent was running interactive, but work perfectly when it was running as a service. The error was ...

I have been trying to script the installation of all the tools and SDKs we need on our TFS Build Agent VMs. This included BizTalk. A quick check on MSDN showed the setup command line parameter I need to install the build components was /ADDLOCAL ProjectBuildComponent So I ran this via my VMs setup PowerShell script, all appeared OK, but when I tried a build I got the error C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftBizTalkBizTalkCommon.targets (189): The "AddBizTalkHiddenReferences" task failed unexpectedly. System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: path1 at System.IO.Path.Combine(String path1, String path2) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.Base.HiddenReferencesHelper.InitializeHiddenReferences() at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.Base.HiddenReferencesHelper.get\_HiddenReferences() at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.Base.HiddenReferencesHelper.GetHiddenReferencesNotAdded(IList\`1 projectReferences) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.BuildTasks.AddBizTalkHiddenReferences.Execute() at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute() at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.<ExecuteInstantiatedTask>d\_\_20.MoveNext() The strange thing is, if I run the BizTalk installer via the UI and select just the ‘Project Build Components’ my build did not give this error. ...

Had an interesting issue during and upgrade from TFS 2012 to 2013.2 today. The upgrade of the files proceeded as expect and the wizard ran. It picked up the correct Data Tier, found the tfs_configuration Db and I was able to fill in the service account details. However, when I got to the reporting section it found the report server URLs, but when it tried to find the tfs_warehouse DB it seemed to lock up, though the test of the SQL instance on the same page worked OK. ...

Having installed my TFS Alert DSL today onto a client’s TFS 2013.2, I have realised some of the documentation was a little unclear. So I have have just updated the download page to provide an easy means to get The actual DSL implementation (without rebuilding the source) A command line tool to create an event source in case you want log to the Windows event log Hope this helps

The problem Today I found I had a problem when trying to associate a Release Management 2013.2 release pipeline with a TFS build. When I tried to select a team project the drop down for the release properties was empty. The strange thing was this installation of Release Management has been working OK last week. What had changed? I suspected an issue connecting to TFS, so in the Release Management Client’s ‘Managing TFS’ tab I tried to verify the active TFS server linked to the Release Management. As soon as I tried this I got the following error that the TFS server was not available. ...

I have just submitted a session for DDDNorth 2014, which is at the University of Leeds on Saturday 18 October. There is still time for you to submit yours Session submission

Rik recently posted about the work we have done to automatically provision TFS build agent VMs. This has come out of us having about 10 build agents on our TFS server all doing different jobs, with different SDKs etc. When we needed to increase capacity for a given build type we had a problems, could another agent run the build? what exactly was on the agent anyway? An audit of the boxes made for horrible reading, there were very inconsistent. ...

I am currently rebuilding our TFS build infrastructure, we have too many build agents that are just too different, they don’t need to be. So I am looking at a standard set of features on a build agent and the ability to auto provision new instances to make scaling easier. More on this in a future post… Anyway whilst testing a new agent I had a problem. A build that had worked on a previous test agent failed with the error ...