Ruminations of J.net

Debugging TFS Build

jsawyer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:04:04 -0600

If nothing else, this is one of the coolest things in TFS 2010. But I am not, unfortunately, afforded the luxury at this time of working with TFS 2010 in my current gig. Though I won’t complain too loudly as it is 2008 and not 2005.

I’m currently working on the build process. As simple as that may sound (and some builds are simple), I do have some pretty high goals. Let me explain. The Team Project is a collection of solutions and projects that are certainly related and tied together in a single software project, but there are 10-15 of them. We have, in Source Control, branches for each release environment and thus, will need to have builds for each environment as well. My ideal scenario would be to pass the environment into TFS Build as a command line argument and have it pull the project from the correct branch, label the project from the correct branch and then create the drop directory with the correct name from the correct branch. And then zip it as well, but that getting that to have the correct branch/environment name is pretty easy as it’s a task that I’m adding in, not changing the behavior of Team Build.

While there is a build debugger in TFS 2010, such a beastie does not come out-of-the-box with TFS. There is, however, MSBuild Sidekick out there that lets you edit and debug MSBuild projects. Since TFS Build projects are MSBuild projects, I figured that this would be a good place to start. So I downloaded the trial with high hopes. I started with simply opening the MSBuild project that TF Build creates when you kick off a build. You’ll find this in the BuildType folder that’s right under the working directory for the Build Agent. It defaults to the Temp folder, but I like to put it in it’s own spot. On the Build Server that I’m working on, it’s F:\Build so you will find your TFSBuild.proj file in F:\Build\BuildType. Simple enough, right? No. When you fire up the debugger, it starts with CanonicalizePaths, then BeforeCompile and then CallCompile. And there it fails.

Digging in a bit, you’ll see a second file in the folder with TFSBuild.proj – TFSBuild.rsp. Hmmm … interesting. Upon opening that up in Notepad, you’ll find a list of stuff that looks remarkably like a series of command-line switches. Guess what? That’s exactly what they are. These are all of the command-line arguments that are passed into MSBuild when the build is kicked off. There are a slew of properties, some loggers and a couple of other things – like the initial target for the build. That’s a little important. Next step – add these into MSBuild Sidekick. You do this in the Properties screen for the build project. First, under project properties, you need to add in ALL of the properties that TFBuild is passing in. Then you have to specify the initial target for MSBuild. They’ll look like this:

When you run it now, it hits CanonicalizePaths and then jumps right to the end and happily informs you that “Build succeeded”. Oh boy. What’s up with this? As it turns out, the first target in the chain for TF Build is “CheckSettingsForEndToEndIteration”. There’s a condition on this - $(IsDesktopBuild)'!='true'. So, let’s now add a property to the command line in our build options: IsDesktopBuild with a value of False. And … here we go again. We get past “CheckSettingsForEndToEndIteration” and go into the “InitializeBuildProperties” target, which calls the GetBuildProperties task. Which then promptly fails with the message:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(267,5): error MSB4018: The "GetBuildProperties" task failed unexpectedly.
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(267,5): error MSB4018: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildNotFoundForUriException: TF214007: No build was found with the URI vstfs:///Build/Build/34. Either the URI does not exist, or TFSTEST\Administrator does not have permission to access it.
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(267,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildServer.GetBuild(Uri buildUri, String[] informationTypes, QueryOptions queryOptions)
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(267,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Tasks.Task.get_BuildDetail()
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(267,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Tasks.GetBuildProperties.get_BuildAgentName()
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(271,15): error MSB4028: The "GetBuildProperties" task's outputs could not be retrieved from the "BuildAgentName" parameter. TF214007: No build was found with the URI vstfs:///Build/Build/34. Either the URI does not exist, or TFSTEST\Administrator does not have permission to access it.

And that, my friends, is where I am now. BUT … at least MSBuild Sidekick allowed be to look at all of the properties as they are when it starts up. And it’s also shown me what the entire process is that TF Build actually goes through. I haven’t done much editing with MSBuild Sidekick (yet) but the debugging … even if I cannot get TFBuild to cooperate fully … is priceless.

UPDATE:

I’ve gotten it working from beginning to end, soup to nuts. :-) Here’s what I did: First, I logged in as the user that the Build Server runs under (don’t lecture me about security; it’s a test environment). I did this because I remember seeing an error message when I tried to change the Build Server’s account about access to some URL or another (I don’t remember the details … I just switched back to the previous account). That still didn’t work. Therefore, I knew that it wasn’t security permissions; that account would need those permissions of Team Foundation Build was going to work at all. So now I’m looking at “No Build Found”. Time to fire up Sql Server Management Studio to see what’s in the TfsBuild database. When I opened up the tbl_Build table (what’s with the “tbl” prefix??? That’s sooo pre-Y2K!), I noticed that there was no build number 34 (look at the URI … it’s in there). BUT … there was a 33 and a 35. Changing the BuildUri property in the BuildOptions (above) did the trick and I was happily stepping through the entire TFS Build process.

TFS & Reporting Services Installation Fun

jsawyer — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:02:30 -0600

Maybe it’s me … maybe SSRS just doesn’t like me. But that has always seemed to be the most difficult piece of the whole Team Foundation Server integrated solution. But, now that I have that out of the way … I had challenges installing TFS into the production environment. Yes, I read the latest installation guide. I print out a checklist and go over it twice. I am well aware (from many bouts of swearing) that it is very important to make sure that you have everything in a row when installing TFS. Granted, it’s not as bad with 2008 as it was with 2005 (which was an improvement over the betas!!!), but it’s still something that you need to do.

Everything is checked. All the prereqs are installed. Did have one warning with the system scan though – it said that the processor on the app tier server wasn’t up to the recommended clock speed. Which was true. But there wasn’t just one processor … it has 4 Intel Xeon hyperthreaded processors in there! So I did ignore that.

Heading off to the races, we’re getting into the final stages of the TFS install … it’s installing Reporting Services. And it’s failing. Is it a security thing? Go check permissions for the account, make sure all is kosher there (it was). Still no go. What gives?

As it turned out, the backend Sql Server already had a default instance of Reporting Services registered to it (i.e. databases, etc) and I had not used an instance name for the TFS installation of reporting services on the app tier. Of course you have to have different instance names on the same box, but you also have to have different instance names from any Reporting Services instance that is registered/using your Data Tier server! I looked in the docs again and again … didn’t see it there. So, word to the wise: when installing Reporting Services for TFS on your App Tier server, check to make sure that there aren’t any instances of Reporting Services associated with your Data Tier server! If so, specify an instance name!

Installing TFS Build on XP/Win2K3 x64

jsawyer — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:50:26 -0600

Here I was happily installing a test environment for TFS. One of the requirements for this environment is x64 so, of course, I’m installing as much as possible on x64. Of course, that does not include the TFS Application Tier … it’s 32-bit only and, while there are hacks out there to get it to install on x64, I’m avoiding that as a) it’s not supported and b) they require manually hacking the MSI file, something that I think is a Very Bad Idea. Part of this was installing TFS Build Services in Win2K3 x64; Win2K8 isn’t blessed in this environment, only Win2K3. In looking at the TFS Installation Guide, it does clearly say that TFS Build will run on x64 on WOW64 mode. And it does.

But … you may run into a little issue with installing TFS Build on x64. It’s the same issue described in this forum post. In shorts, here’s what happens:

You’re cruising along in the TFS Build install and all is hunky-dory.

You then get this error:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Build Setup
Error 32000.The Commandline '"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe" -ga "[Domain]\[Account]"' returned non-zero value: 1.

Running the command manually gives you this:

[c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727]aspnet_regiis.exe -ga "[Domain]\[Account]"
Start granting SFINTERNAL\tfsbuild access to the IIS metabase and other directories used by ASP.NET.
An error has occurred: 0x800703f0 An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist.

Keep in mind that this is IIS 6.0 on x64. By default, it’s running in 64-bit mode. And it won’t allow 32-bit applications. But … you are running aspnet_regiis from the x86 (32-but) installation folder. Hmmm … a clue perhaps? As it turns out, that’s the key to the solution. Here’s what you need to do (and it does not include a manual install): flip IIS 6.0 into 32-bit mode. Unlike IIS 7.0, IIS 6 does not support running both 32-bit and 64-bit applications at the same time. To do this, running the following from the command line:

cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1

When the installation is finished, you can flip IIS back to 64-bit mode – this seems to work just fine (so far, at least) by change the 1 to a 0.

TFS Workgroup to Active Directory Migration Comments

jsawyer — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:45:40 -0600

Moving your TFS installation from a workgroup to an Active Directory domain? Good for you! Honestly, you shoulda started with the domain anyway but we’ll not go there right now. Maybe you didn’t have the domain in place in the beginning. I’ve been playing with the process. Well, I wouldn’t say playing as I’m not into inflicting pain on myself.

First step, of course, is to RTFM. There’s a decent article on MSDNon how to do that. When you read the article, it seems pretty straightforward. Not necessarily simple – it’ll make you wish you’d started out in a domain – but straightforward. Follow the steps and all should be good, right? Well, it’s all good on the TFS side. When you get to the end and you’re thinking to yourself “Phew … almost done with this” you come across this little tidbit at the end of the article:

No tools are available to automatically change SharePoint Products and Technologies and Reporting Services users and groups and their role memberships from local accounts (used in workgroups) to domain accounts. Although the local accounts will still work as local accounts, you might want to take advantage of the flexibility and management of Active Directory groups. Both SharePoint Products and Technologies and SQL Server Reporting Services will show the users and groups and their role memberships for each site or report folder. You can populate SharePoint Products and Technologies and Reporting Services to use new or existing Active Directory groups depending on your new deployment.

It’s so small that, in the context of the article, you just might miss it. And remember – you can’t edit permissions for SharePoint or Reporting Services from TFS Explorer; that’s why they have the TFS Admin tool. And that’s exactly what you have to do … go project by project and set the permissions for SharePoint and Reporting Services. If you have a lot of projects, this gets to be mind-numbing. This is a VERY good reason to use groups for your management!!! Even if they are local groups, you can put the domain members in there and be done with with … no TFS Admin tool required (except for setting up the initial permissions).

But wait, there’s more. The local machine administrators group doesn’t have access to any of the SharePoint sites for Team System!! So you have to log in to TFS with a local account that has admin rights on the SharePoint sites. And is a server admin on TFS as well. Then you can go about fixing up the permissions. One more thing – I was adding the local machine Administrators group to every SharePoint (Full Control) and Reporting Services (Content Manager) site. You cannot add BUILTIN\Administrators as the group into the TFS Admin Tool (it gives you an error) … you have to add the group as “.\Administrators”. But SharePoint doesn’t like that syntax for the local administrator’s group and fails when you try to apply permissions. Once you refresh the view. you’ll see the Administrators groups listed as “BUILTIN\Administrators” (then why couldn’t I just add it like that??). You can then set Full Control permissions for the SharePoint site and apply your changes.

I really hope that they improve the permission/security management story in TFS 2010. I’ve not seen anything about that, but it sure would be nice.

Edit: Forgot to mention this … you’ll also need to change the account for the SharePoint Timer Service to the domain account for the TFS Service. If you don’t, OWSTIMER.EXE will very happily eat your CPU cycles. Once I changed the account to the domain TFS Service account, all was good.

Azure .NET Dojo PPT

jsawyer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:39:14 -0600

OK … here it is. I know it took too long to get it up here, but better late than never.

The PPTX file is here and the labs and source for the (modified) personal web site starter kit are here. I will be doing a post about the (numerous) things that are wrong with that starter kit.

Final (?) Comments on Windows Server 2008 R2 as a desktop

jsawyer — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:35:41 -0600

I know … I keep bringing this up. It’s been a long road and there were still a couple of things that I found that I needed to really, truly, fully replace Vista/Windows 7 client with Windows Server 2008 R2 for my desktop OS … on both my traditional “desktop” machine and my laptop. I think, finally, I’ve got all of them worked out.

Power Management/Sleep/Hibernate Mode: I absolutely love sleep mode. I see no need to keep my machine running at 100% power all of the time. And I’m impatient so I don’t like to wait for a full reboot if I don’t have to. I don’t do hibernate too much but that’s also nice to have. As I’m sure you are aware, Windows Server has no problem with the whole power management stuff … until you enable the Hyper-V role (which is one of the biggest reasons that I want to run Server 2008). Once you enable Hyper-V, you lose all power management capabilities. In Windows Server 2008, there was nothing you could do about this. When folks raised this as an issue, Microsoft’s response was … tough. Hyper-V is supposed to be on a server and a server never sleeps. It doesn’t matter if you have VM’s running or not either. A lot of folks came up with workarounds/hacks that “enabled” this, with various degrees of success. Well, apparently there was enough of a hubbub for the Microsoft folks to do something about it. You’ll need to create a new boot entry with BCDEdit and set hypervisorlaunchtype to off. Full details and step-by-step instructions are on Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog. You will have to reboot to re-enable Hyper-V (and the hypervisor) but that’s OK for me … I don’t always run VM’s and I’ll accept the reboot for that. It’s not my ideal scenario, but it works.

Zune: This sucked. I couldn’t get the Zune software to install for anything. Improper version or some such nonsense. Which meant that I couldn’t access my Zune pass and couldn’t sync with my Zune unless I dual booted. Apparently, the Zune folks don’t think that Windows Server is an appropriate platform for Zune. Fortunately, I found a post on David Zazzo’s blog that takes you through doing this step-by-step. One note: I right-clicked on packages\Zune-x64.msi and clicked on “Troubleshoot Compatability” … which applied the settings “Skip Version Check”. Just running ZuneSetup.exe … even in compatibility mode … didn’t work.

.NET Dojo: Windows Azure

jsawyer — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:49:58 -0600

Here’s the info on the next .NET Dojo. Did you think it’d be gone? Well, I hope not and I’m working with Zain to transition the program over to him. That said, I will be doing my very first Dojo! The topic is Windows Azure (duh!) and it promises to be a good time for all.

Event Overview

Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications and services on the Internet in Microsoft data centers.

In this Dojo, we'll dig into how to work with Windows Azure to build applications that run in the cloud ... using the skills you have and the tools that you are familiar with. We'll introduce the key concepts in lecture and then immediately apply those concepts in hands on labs. At the end of the Dojo, you'll be able to create applications to leverage this platform and its functionality, including tables, blobs, queues and, of course, web sites.

Attendees will be expected to bring their own laptops with the prerequisites (below) to participate in the hands-on labs.

Prerequisites:

· Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 SP1

· IIS 7.0 (with ASP.NET, WCF HTTP Activation and optionally CGI)

· Visual Studio 2008 Professional (Trial OK)

· Visual Studio 2008 SP1

· Sql Server Express (2005 or 2008)

· Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP

· KB967631: Update for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Debugger

Dates, Locations and Registration:

Houston: June 19, 2009 1PM-5PM @ the Houston Microsoft Office

Austin: June 26, 2009 1PM-5PM @ the Austin Microsoft Office

Hope to see you there!!

Life After Microsoft

jsawyer — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:40:20 -0600

Yes, there is “Life After Microsoft”. As I said, I’ve been taking something of a break but I’m getting back into the swing of things. Not that it was really much of a “vacation” … I just couldn’t stay off the computer or dev stuff, but it was light and nothing serious.

So what’s next? Well, after some discussion, I’ll be working with EPS Software on several different projects and initiatives. I’ll also be working with my old friend Dana on building out KinetikHosts and a startup web site that I won’t detail here. The biggest part, however, will be working with Markus and the EPS family and I’m very excited about that. I’ve known the folks there for quite some time and it’s a great environment – challenging, but relaxed and fun.

So … there you have it!

More on Windows Server 2008 R2 as a desktop

jsawyer — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:13:37 -0600

Since I did the last post on this, I’ve also (now) installed Server 2008 R2 on my personal desktop … as my laptop had to be turned in. In doing this and getting it set up to be a day-to-day desktop OS (as opposed to a demo machine OS), I ran across a couple of other things that I thought were worth noting.

IE ESC: That’s Enhanced Security Configuration … the ultra-secure-because-it’s-only-HTML mode of Internet Explorer that is enabled by default on Windows Server. Again, something that makes a TON of sense but it doesn’t work very well when you are using it as a desktop. I had thought (silly me) that it’d be easy … go into the Server Manager and turn it off. Well, there were complications. Here’s the deal: I run with a different account than the built-in Administrator account. It’s also the account that ties my machine to my Windows Home Server (which is way cool, btw). When I created the account, I did not initially add it to the Administrators group. So, when I turned IE ESC off for Admins, it didn’t turn off for that account … because it wasn’t an admin. Easy enough … I turned off IE ESC for all users. Nope. Didn’t work. Added my account to the Administrators group. And it still didn’t work … I was still running IE in the Enhanced Security mode. Even after rebooting. I went to “User Accounts” in Control Panel (it’s just like on the desktop version) and couldn’t add that account as an Administrator account there either. So … I wound up deleting the account and recreating the account using the "User Accounts” applet in Control Panel, creating it as an administrator account. Then it worked. Just fine. I don’t know why this happened. I cannot explain it at all. But there it is.

Windows 7 Themes: I did turn on the themes and eye candy as mentioned previously. But the Win7 themes aren’t included and I couldn’t find a way to install them. Easy enough … copy them from a Windows 7 installation. They will be under %WINDIR%\Resources\Themes. You’ll also want to copy the pictures (%WINDIR%\Web\Wallpaper) and the cursors (%WINDIR%\Cursors). They will then appear in your personalization window.

Windows Search: This one is important for finding stuff in Outlook and on your drives in a reasonable amount of time. It is not installed by default in Windows Server … and Outlook will tell you all about it and the necessity of installing it if you want to do any searching. You cannot find it in Features. There’s a download for Windows Search 4.0 for Vista … that doesn’t work either (refuses to install). Where is it? It is under Roles …File Services … Windows Search. Perfectly logical right?

So there it is. I’ll post any more tidbits as I happen across them. So far, though, all is well and happy.

Leaving Microsoft …

jsawyer — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:36:05 -0600

As I’m sure you know, Microsoft has been reorganizing, eliminating positions and reducing headcount … layoffs.

Well, after 9 years, I’m one of the folks hit by that.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that’s it’s great, wonderful, etc. etc. It’s not. It’s hard and it sucks. But it could be a lot worse … Microsoft’s severance package is extremely generous and it will certainly give me the opportunity to take a little vacation time while I determine where I want to go from here. Beyond that, I will have assistance for outplacement as well. So, even in the leaving, I find myself lucky to work for a company as great as Microsoft. And, at the end of it all, I know that I will land on my feet and that the experiences that I’ve had at Microsoft will certainly be a part of that. I have had worse things happen to me … I have been through far worse things than this … and I have always come out better for it.

It has been a good 9 years. I’ve seen a lot of change at Microsoft and a lot of priorities realigned. I’ve seen the company grow in new directions and in new ways that none of us would have imagined in 2000. It’s always been interesting and challenging, to say the least. It’s been a fun ride and I don’t regret a moment of it. I, too, have grown a lot during this time.

Now … the question of tomorrow. I cannot tell you anything right now. What I can say is that I will be taking a week or two off (the longest *unplugged* vacation that I’ve had, I think, since high school) and figuring out where I want to go from here. But I can tell you this … I have been very involved in the community here in South Central, in Second Life, and in the open source world. That will not stop. I will continue to be active in those communities. It is something that I believe in.

But … for right now, for a time … I’m gonna take some time off. I’m gonna go hit my XBox and blow stuff up. Aliens and bad guys of all stripes … you have been warned.