Firstly, native TFS 2010 support. This means no need to install Team Explorer 2008 and the forward compatibility update. Unfortunately you still need Team Explorer 2010 since Microsoft has not released TFS API redistributables, as far as I know. Some of the nice things that come with TFS 2010 support hierarchical queries in the context menu and native query picker for the menu query.

ClickOnce deployment is now used. The intent it too easily allow users to know if updates are available, since I have such a sporadic release timeline. Note that you will need to manually uninstall the previous version. In theory the two should coexist. I haven’t tried it and I don’t recommend it. Having the two would just become confusing. The installer is still available if that’s your cup-of-tea.

I would like to thank some volunteers that helped with this release contributing to the project. It is great to know it is not just my work team using TFS Working On and others are finding the tool useful and a great time saver.

Here is the simple everyday improvements made that should alleviate users:

• Refresh option in the Menu Query
• Rounding time tracked to 2 decimal places
• Right-click context menu to allow viewing working items from the search results
• Prompt for estimate if none set
• Esc key dismisses Select Work Item dialog
• Work Item mappings stored in version control

For more details see the Documentation.

As usual a bunch of bugs fixes included:

The question of using the Ribbon in Visual Studio was raised on the new Visual Studio UserVoice feedback forums. I personally gave this three votes, but I am also in favour of as little toolbars as possible. So I added the comment:

The Ribbon done right would have a customizable quick access toolbar which would include the Debug button and your other frequent ones there. And as with the Office Ribbons you can collapse it to just the tabs, so in effect, you can have more screen real estate all the time while still accessing any functions you want with, at most, two clicks. Much better than continually showing and hiding the relevant toolbars. However, Visual Studio currently lets you put toolbar buttons right up in the menu row, which is where I have my common buttons and can remove any other toolbar.

That would give you something like this, as I have in Windows Live Writer:

However, I just want to elaborate what I meant by buttons in the menu bar, as my colleagues didn’t know you could do it either.

1. Right-click any where on the toolbars and click Customize…
2. Select the Commands tab
   
3. Menu Bar is already selected, so click, Add Command…
   
4. Select the command you want
   
5. Position and Customize it’s details
   

And here is the result:

Debug Lambda Expressions

Although I think the Ribbon would clean things up nicely and allow everyone easy minimal toolbars with the quick access, better function and shortcut key discovery, as seen above, it is already quite customizable. With that in mind I think the time would be much better spent getting the debugger able to evaluate Lambda expressions. Time and time again, I am stopped because I cannot evaluate a simple .Select(x =>x == y). Whether this is in the code you have written, or just something you want to write in the quick watch or immediate window to determine the contents of something quickly. I raised this suggestion:

Debug Lambda expressions

Allow Quick Watch and other Debug functions to work with Lambda expressions.

"Expression cannot contain lambda expressions" makes this powerful language feature second-class within the IDE.

Especially for data intensive applications being able to write Lambda expressions in the Quick Watch, Watch, Immediate Windows and debug evaluation is a must have.

Which I am pleased to say has got to the top 3 on the Hottest Ideas. So please vote on it.

• Strictly define your task
  Each time I get to my computer for what is usually between 1 and 3 hour blocks I need to ensure I aim to complete a specific task in that time. Obviously not much can be done in such sort blocks, but even if you only get 20 minutes, try and define a task that can be completed in that time. It may be simply a single function. It may be outlining and estimating tasks for later.
• Make sure everything you are doing is on task
  Everything you do, you need to ask yourself, “is this going to help me do my task right now?”. If the answer is no drop it. In such short blocks and when they come sporadically it is very difficult to keep multiple things going at once. It takes a longer time to pick up from where you left off and that leaves you less time to get things done. Sticking to just the task at hand and completing helps you see real progress on your project which helps with motivation.
• Do things once
  You should always aim to do a task and move on. Do it quickly, and mostly correctly. This is a hard one, because every developer loves to mull over code and make sure it is perfect, optimized, generic, reusable and solve every problem you may encounter. This one requires a very good balance of ensuring progress while ensuring the really important aspects such as good architecture and well tested while ensuring you are coding for the problem at hand, not one that may be.
• Learn only what you need to know
  Do not over analyse possible solutions or completely learn new frameworks that you might need. Certainly be diligent, but if you find something that works that is not obviously bad, go with it and stick with it until you learn otherwise. Even if you later learn that there is a better way to do that task, do not redo it unless it is causing an issue (see above Do things once).
• Set yourself Deadlines
  Even if you have no one waiting on you, and your schedule is yours to decide (or worse, not decide), you still need to have reasonable targets and really aim to hit them. This helps you cut any tasks that aren’t going to get you to that goal. This will give you only the important tasks and help you progress faster. You do not want to feel you are stagnant on a never ending project.
• Get out version 1.0
  1.0 is something to be proud of but by no means is it your complete vision for the product. Getting it out quickly helps you get vital feedback from you users and can help direct your tasks to what people want. This something need to be done carefully since if you have a big launch and get lots of people to try it out and version 1.0 is buggy and incomplete, they may be reluctant to try again. You should aim for minimal features to do the primary task and well tested. Be open with the users so that they can see more is coming and that you are open and responsive to feedback.

This should result in just enough software with little-to-no waste. If you want to really see how extreme you can successfully go, check out 37 Signals’ Getting Real book.

1. Buy a domain name and point it to your web host
2. Setup a landing page. Keep your copy really short (and punchy). You need to pique interest, not convince them to buy.
3. Collect emails on that landing page

As stated in my last post I had already setup my domain name and hosting with GoDaddy. This took me around 90 minutes researching plans and checking domain names. I think this took too long, as I fell into my habitual analysis paralysis. I ended up spending only $50.05:

• Hosting – Grid – Economy – Windows – AP Region – 1 year (recurring) $47.88
• .COM Domain Name Registration – 1 year (recurring) $2.17

For that little, it was not worth the time I spent weighing it all up. I kept looking at the Deluxe account which allow a lot more, for not much more. The multi-year lock-ins for much larger discounts were also tempting, but I think there is more merit in making a quick decision with these little things. Something I’m working on.

Next was to install WordPress. This was very easy with GoDaddy and all provided free under the hosting plan. Personally I do not particularly like the LaunchPad theme. Whether it matters or not I do not know. I ended up finding the theme Ice Breaker which I preferred. This was another step that I wasted too much time on. However, both of them next time will be very quick.

Setting up a MailChimp account was very quick and painless. I had to leave a few things going at once though, because I didn’t have the email account setup first. Doing that with GoDaddy again was very easy and provided free with my domain name registration. Just something I should have done first. As I had my Twitter sign up sitting there waiting for the email account to activate also.

Once email, MailChimp and Twitter were setup I could then modify the Ice Breaker theme in WordPress. I’m still new to WordPress, but finding where to do this was easy enough. The difficultly I had was modify the page to submit the email address to MailChimp instead of FeedBurner as it was setup by default to do. In MailChimp get the code for the embedded form and strip all elements and styles from it. You can then add the required Divs and Ids as required to submit to MailChimp.

From the landing page I have left the RSS feed available. This by default, will link to the default word press Hello World! post. Deleting the post resulted in an error from the RSS feed. Instead I changed that post to say a similar message to my landing page, in case anyone subscribes to the feed. Time spent: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Including getting hosting I’m now up to 4 hours 15 minutes. It adds up quick. Going forward I’m going to enter all my work items into TFS and use TFS Working On to track my time. In this blog I will continue to detail time and money spent (and received hopefully) and other difficulties or unexpected things that may arise. But for now here is my landing page for Search TFS. Please sign up if you are interested and I will also update how many email address I get. I do not think my text is quite punchy and I might update it later, but now I’m off to do some coding.

I am really motivated at the moment by Software by Rob to get going with my own software products. Anyone wishing to write their own software this is a must read. Rob freely shares his start-up and marketing experiences that are invaluable. So following Why you should start Marketing the day you start coding I have bought a domain name and some hosting and activated it last night. In the next week I plan to put up my Landing Page. I will be detailing here how things are going along the way for my personal log and anyone who is interested. This will be my first time trying to sell a product after two "successful" free products, TFS Working On and Bluetooth Auto Lock Gadget. I have no idea how well I will be able to sell it, but once I have a little more information I will be setting small financial and user targets. This project won’t be so much about making money but more on the experience. I want to understand what is involved first hand. It is a product in a domain I am very comfortable with and will help me out regardless if anyone else finds it worthwhile.

The product, Search TFS.

I have finally released TFS Working On 1.2. You can download it from here. It includes basic support for TFS 2010 with Team Explorer 2008 Forward Compatibility update installed and the following features:

Menu Query list

You can select an existing TFS query from the configuration pages to use a quick start list accessible from the TFS Working On menu. This removes the need to search for work items, and you can just pick them off your list.

Note: TFS 2010 Hierarchical Queries are not yet supported.

Prompt on resume

When you are away from your computer and TFS Working On automatically pauses monitoring, you can enable the option to be prompted on resume. You are given the option to Record the time away, for the instances when you were working on the work item, just not on the computer, like in a meeting or discussion with a colleague. Resume working, time away is not recorded, like going out for lunch, and coming back to continue. Or Stop, time away is not recorded and you do not resume working on the selected work item.

Cancel Currently Working On

You can now cancel your current working on, preventing any time being recorded against the work item.

Work Item Title Tooltip and Notification

The title of your current work item is now displayed in the balloon notification and the TFS Working On notification tray icon tooltip.

Data Warehouse Processing (TFS 2008 only)

TFS Working On allows updating of the Data Warehouse and TFS Analysis Service cube on from the Configuration pages. This forces an update without the need to remote onto the TFS Server or wait for the scheduled time. Useful when you need to ensure you Warehouse data accurately reflects the current Work Item data when generating a report to distribute.

Existing Raised Bugs Fixed

Version 1.3

I can now begin work on the next version. I have the goals outlined here which are currently just native TFS 2010 support and Windows 7 Integration. I have begun organizing the work item list to prioritize new features. I have you preferences please raise a work item and vote for features you want done first.

I would like to thank Patrick Smacchia from NDepend who have graciously sponsored TFS Working On with a professional license. NDepend is a static analyzer 100% integrated in VS that simplifies managing complex .NET code base and achieve high code quality. This analysis will highlight to me clearly the dependencies relationships I have in the TFS Working On and enable to correct it much easier. I already know I have violated the Single Responsibility Principle greatly to get it out the door in time for the first release, now I have the best tool around to help me fix it. Below is an image of the dependencies from NDepend.

Recently I took the opportunity, safely between product releases, to upgrade our TFS 2008 server to TFS 2010. I performed a Migration Upgrade to new virtual servers. I have a server for each tier, Application, SQL Database, Analysis Server, Reporting Server and Build Server. Overall the upgrade was very smooth and error free. Very impressive work done by Microsoft to get this complex operation simplified. I had absolutely no issues with the version control or work items, so downtime for my team was very minimal once they installed the forward compatibility update. I did however have some issues, which I will outline and the solutions I found.

Backing up our existing TFS databases, transferring them across our (slow) network and restoring them on the new SQL Server, was the longest task. The actual upgrade by the TFS 2010 administration of the TFS 2008 database (about 25GB) took around an hour. Not bad.

The data warehouse did not update right away. I had to manually trigger a rebuild. Using the cube afterwards we found it was not fully populated. This was very odd and gave the first use experience of the new cube a very bad impressive. Over the week however, I was monitoring the warehouse views and database size and saw this steadily increase until all the data was in there. We have our own BI Reporting tool, so all our existing reports were completely broken due to the cube schema changes. The jury is still out whether the cube is easier to use or not, but we are now powering away rebuilding all our reports.

Most of the pain was getting the new build server up and running. This is partly due just to getting our prerequisites in order, but there were a few issues from Team Build 2010 itself, since we were not upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 just yet (we will soon).

Firstly, MSBuild 4 failed to detect dependencies. This caused the projects in the solutions to build out of order, and subsequently fail. The solution is to update the dependencies manually in the solution file and the fix is found here.

Secondly, it failed to find the Bootstrapper SDK path. A reinstall of the Windows SDK may have helped this, but the easy solution is to just edit the registry and add the path. Solution found here and here.

Thirdly, and most painfully, and still not resolved is that the Test Results are not published and the error message is TF270015: ‘MSTest.exe’ returned an unexpected exit code. Expected ’0′; actual ’1′. This means that they are not available from the build details, the drop folder or the cube. I can only see the test results by looking through the text MSBuild log file. This issue has been resolved but the fix is not yet available. I assume it will only be available after we have moved to VS 2010 anyway which does do much better management of Unit Tests by removing the need for the horrible vsmdi.

Lastly, we still get numerous TFS237086: The work item cannot be saved because at least one field contains a value that is not allowed. I do not know why we get this message sometimes especially since the work item number quoted has been updated and associated with the build and there is no invalid state of it. One theory is that multiple builds are updating the same work items and the build does not refresh the work item just before it updates it.

The Reports node in Team Explorer had a red cross on it and I was eager to see the new reports. I found that the new instance of Reporting Services did not have the correct permissions for the users. Fixing that and the Team Explorer reports node came good and the old TFS 2008 reports all worked against the new data warehouse and cube. Nice. The new reports however, were not there. Importing them from the exported CMMI Process Template did not map them to the data sources correctly. Manually fixing that got them working, but I imported them to the wrong folder structure, so the links did not work. Later I found this page which outlines a process to import the new reports. I am most interested in the Excel reports, but I have not connected to SharePoint yet, since I will wait till we upgrade it to SharePoint 2010, so I was quite disappointed I could not get them without SharePoint. We use our own reporting tool anyway, so this was more for interest and replicating the Reporting services reports in our BI tool from the Cube was very easy.

Once the builds were working I set off to enable the Test Case Management which is a big reason for us to upgrade to get started with right away. Following the instructions here was easy although there were errors, but the user comments are helpful getting around them. I had already quite heavily customized our work item layout so I did not have to follow many of those modifications. It was a very simple task with just these steps:

1. Download the Process Template
2. Import Link Types (Shared Steps and Tested By)
3. Import the Work Item Types (Test Case and Shared Steps)
4. Import Categories
5. Modifying the Bug template, just to add a couple of fields. I did not modify my layouts.
6. Specify the Bug Type to and bugfieldmappings for Test Manager
7. Grant permissions

I did this for two projects and the second time was very quick. There were however issues at step 3, 5 and 6. Firstly, step 3. The downloaded work item template has the new Names for existing Fields. This caused the error TF212018: Work item tracking schema validation error: TF26177: The field System.IterationId cannot be renamed from ‘IterationID’ to ‘Iteration ID’. This involved just editing the work item type xml. For me, it was:

TestCase: Area ID –> AreaID
SharedSteps: Area ID –> AreaID; Iteration ID –> IterationID

Second, step 6 which caused me to go back to step 5 later. This was painful! Bug Field Mappings. Contrary to the article and name of Bug MAPPINGS, you cannot specify another field you want the Test Runner to populate. I have tried to get it to use the existing Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.StepsToReproduce field with no avail. MVP Ed Blankenship has confirmed this, that the values are hard coded! So thirdly, was to go back to step 5. To resolve it I had to:

1. Add the new ReproSteps field.
2. Set it to copy StepsToReproduce.
3. Update all Bugs work items in the project by adding a comment in the history. (Use Excel, the new bulk edit in the web access is slow!)
4. Edit the form to display ReproSteps where it was StepsToReproduce
5. Remove the Required on StepsToReproduce and add it to ReproSteps

Now though, the Test Runner populates our Bug templates nicely, and performing these on the second project was quite quick. However, the upgrade could have been much smoother if the mappings worked. It felt like Microsoft had disregarded existing installs in this area. Next steps are now powering ahead with the new test case management, which seems nice, but the Test Management interface is certainly version 1 to put it nicely. Upgrading our projects to Visual Studio 2010 to get more benefits from TFS 2010 with the client designed for it. And plan the next iteration with the hierarchical work items.

In regards to my post Opera please compete, not complain I was a harsh on Opera and suggested they just get on with adding useful features and function. Since then I have been watching them with little hope until I saw this post Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Labs. This comes with a host of new features including a super fast JavaScript engine Carakan and Windows 7/Vista platform integration. If Opera 10.5, if lives up these promises, there is no reason it should not be the most used browser.

Some time later on a work mates computer I saw him running 10.5. He usually runs the pre-release but told me this was the release, but it was not automatically updating. I check it out on Opera.com and sure enough it was released on the 2nd March. The day was the 16th so I tried checking for updates, but was told I was up to date.

I therefore went and manually updated at work, but was not so happy with the release yet for home. Sometime early April it began prompting to update at home and I did. I can see why the staged release was done. To me it still has some stability issues not seen in the previous version. On Windows 7 however, I now enjoy Opera with Aero Glass, as well as Aero Peek and Jump Lists. Now, you can easily access your Speed Dials, tabs and more from the Taskbar. And it is faster than ever. So well worth the update. Well done to the Opera team.

We have been looking at TFS Deployer for a long time to automate further some of our processes. Today (mid last year, I’ve been sitting on this draft for a while) it finally became high enough priority to get it going. This will allow us to automatically deploy to test server, verify the build, and deploy to a wider internal audience to allow us to get early feedback on our latest product development.

I downloaded the latest source in case I had issues, I would be able to debug them and rebuild the solution myself quickly. I opened TFS Deployer\Trunk\TfsDeployer\TfsDeployer.sln and built the solution. Looking at the installation instructions I was disappointed to find there was no installer and this would be a bit of a manual process. Fortunately however, the instructions are well detailed.

Installing TFS Deployer

Step 1: Copy the application files: I copied from TFS Deployer\Trunk\TfsDeployer\TfsDeployer\bin\Release files, TFSDeployer.exe, TFSDeployer.exe.config and Readify.Useful.TeamFoundation.Common.dll to the path C:\Program Files\TFS Deployer on the TFS Server. I later found that there is an installer to do this, but I don’t know what version it is.
Step 2: Install the service: The service can install itself using TFSDeployer.exe –i. Nice.
Step 3: Determine the service account: I reviewed the permissions required and decide I would like to run this under our TFSService account. It is not a local administrator, but does have the required privileges into TFS.
Step 4: Edit the configuration file: Well documented what each key is and what needs to be set. Although for the most part these are self explanatory, it would be nice to have the description directly in the config file also. I uncomment the system.diagnostics section to allow errors and warnings to be logged to the event viewer.
Step 5: Start the service: Set the service account to the one from Step 3 and start the service. Service starts, then stops. Hmm….

On to the Troubleshooting. I started up a console running as TFSService and ran TFSDeployer.exe –d.

Permission error creating the WCF endpoint. In step 3 were the instructions using httpconfig to give permission for the URL to the required account, TFSService. However I followed the URL given in the error message http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353. This gave me the instructions for giving permissions without having to use a 3rd party application. I run the command: netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8881/BuildStatusChangeEvent user=<domain>\TFSService, which returns, URL reservation successfully added. Sounds good. (I found this later detailed here). I start the service again and this time it works. To confirm the registration of the service to the TFS Event system, I have a look in the TfsIntegration database, table dbo.tbl_subscription, and I see an entry for BuildStatusChangeEvent at address http://<machinename>:8881/BuildStatusChangeEvent.

Preparing the Deployment Script

Step 1: Create Deployment Script: Create Deployment directory under the TeamBuildTypes/<Build Definition Name> directory in the source control explorer.
Step 2: Create the Mapping File: The file template link is dead, but there is the text just below the link. I copy and paste it into a new file DeploymentMappings.xml which is added to the new folder in the source control explorer. Opening this file with Visual Studio which has the open solution allows it to pick up Intellisense from the xsd from TFS Deployer\Trunk\TfsDeployer\TfsDeployer\Configuration\DeploymentMappings.xsd. Updating the mappings for the transition states is straight forward. Firstly however, I needed sort out exactly what our build quality states should be. This is done by clicking the Manage Build Qualities button on the Build Explorer.

Step 3: Create PowerShell script: There is a demo script on the page to help get started. What is also good and interesting point mentioned is that you have access to the TFS IBuildDetail, making it very simple to retrieve the required paths. I create a script to print out all the available properties to the event viewer (found in  TfsDeployer\TfsDeployer\Samples\PrepareForInvestigation.ps1) and then check in the Deployment folder with the mappings file and my script.

 
Step 4: Change the Build Quality to Test it: I opened up the build explorer, changed the build quality, and refreshed my Event Viewer on the TFS server where TFS Deploy is. Nothing? Huh? I subscribe to the BuildStatusChangeEvent alert through the alerts dialog.

Changing the build quality does send me an email. I check the URL http://<tfsserver>:8881/BuildStatusChangeEvent/BuildStatusChangeEvent and get an empty page with no errors, so I assume the web service is working. I then change the build quality on the Nightly build definition, rather than the Continuous that I have configured TFS Deployer against. Another look in the event viewer is an entry from TfsDeployer, Reading Configuration File:C:\Users\TFSService\AppData\Local\Temp\415dab85-39cb-4e8c-8518-3be1ad6d1e4c\DeploymentMappings.xml failed. The file also does not exist. I assume this is an error because this is no mappings file for this build definition, so it is working for the continuous, just not executing the script properly. Either my script has an error, or it is not running at all. I set the value on the switches to 3 on the TFSDeployer.exe.config for Informational message to be logged, restart the service and change the build definition again. The last of the 11 logged messages is the Eval results: isComputerMatch=False, isOldValueMatch=True, isNewValueMatch=True, isUserPermitted=True. Now it is clear to see what I did wrong here. Now I get Matching mapping found, running script TestTfsDeployScript.ps1 but the script does not appear to run. I set the execution policy of PowerShell to remote signed, Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned, but still nothing. I started the remote debugger, attached to the process, and stepped through to see what was going on. While it was paused, I had access to the script it had downloaded and run it as TFSService. That worked. I then continued stepping through the code and then… everything worked!? I don’t know exactly why it is all working on that machine now, but it does, and it works a treat.

Shared Scripts

Most of my actions from the Build Quality change will be deploying the application to different servers. The script will be the same with different server and database connection details. The is where the feature Shared Deployment Resources feature comes in very nicely. This setting, SharedResourceServerPath, is in the TFSDeployer.exe.config. After setting the value to a source control path, i.e. $/MyProj/TeamBuildTypes/Deployment/. Restart the TFS Deployer service to ensure that the new setting is picked up. Extract the content of the deployment script into a new parameterized script saved to the shared deployment directory. Below is the code snippet for a named parameter script with default values.

The script will now be downloaded to the same directory as the mapping script. However, the executing directory is the default (usually C:\Windows\System32) and the mapping script is started up using the full path. Calling the shared script therefore cannot be done with .\ScriptName.ps1, however, it is easy to get the full path of the current executing and call the shared script with that path.

Set User Permissions

Manage Build Quality should allow be done by Quality Assurance. Fortunately, this is very easy to restrict. Right-click on the Project node in Team Explorer and select Security… The complete explanation of the permissions are available here, but all that is required is to Add the Quality Assurance group and select, Edit build quality and Start a build.

Deployment scripts have the potential to do some powerful things, allow the deployment folders to only be checked out/in by Senior Developers. In the Source Control Explorer, right-click the Deployment folder and select Properties… Select the Security tab, uncheck Inherit security settings and check all permissions for groups that require full access (e.g. Administrators, Service Accounts), and give Contributors just Read permission. Ensure your TFSDeployer service user can still access the path.

Improving the installation experience

Now that I have been through all that, I do not want to have to repeat it for each server I wish to put TFS Deployer on. So I have created a WiX unattended installer that will do the steps in the Installing TFS Deployer section above. That is, deploying the program files, setting the config file, installing the service with a specified service user, give the user permission to the URL Reservation and set remote signed execution permission for PowerShell. Now I just need to run this msi from the command prompt with the parameters for my configuration.

C:\Users\Matthew>msiexec /i TfsDeployer_Setup.msi SERVICE_ACCOUNT=<domain>\tfsService SERVICE_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD=tfsServicePassword TFS_URL=http://tfs:8080 SMTP_SERVER=mail.<domain.com> TO_ADDRESS=matthew@<domain.com> FROM_ADDRESS=tfsDeployer@<domain.com>

Notes

• Not specifying the SERVICE_ACCOUNT will install the service and attempt to start as LOCAL SYSTEM, which will most likely fail to connect to TFS.
• The Base URL is automatically set as http://<ComputerName>:8881.
• The installer only works on Vista or above. This is due to using netsh for http reservation and I did not want to spend the time getting the Access Control List (ACL) in the form of a Security Descriptor Definition Language (SDDL) string for use with httpcfg on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.
• If the service fails to install or start you will get the option to ignore. This will allow everything to be in place to diagnose with TFSDeployer.exe -d.
• To debug errors during the installation add /lv* install.log.

Files

I like to work at home, and my set up at home is almost at good as work, but due to less distractions it can be better. When I created a TFS workspace for my home computer (was Vista, now Windows 7), I got the latest source, built it, and all was good… almost. It did not run. We are building an ASP.NET application and when running under the ASP.NET Development Server (WebDev.WebServer.exe) I would get sent to this error page, which told me nothing useful about why it was failing.

This was irritating, but didn’t really bother me because I could work around it quite quickly. I opened the Web properties of the ASP.NET Web Application project (right click the project, select Properties and then the Web tab on the left) and set it to run from the Local IIS (Internet Information Services) Web server. The only issue this had was I must run Visual Studio as an Administrator since I have User Account Control (UAC) enabled, and I don’t get Edit and Continue.

Today however, this won’t do. Today I want to create a new workspace on my home machine to work on multiple unrelated things at the same time. Multiple workspaces is a great productivity boost, from reproducing issues locally in an unchanged environment, to running units tests or other long running processes and working on something else while they are chugging away. I do not want to create multiple virtual directories in IIS, although I could. One of the things I like about the environments I have set up, is that they allow virtually no configuration on any PC you want to use, as long as you have Visual Studio with Team Explorer, you are ready to develop. And our rich wiki requires OneNote and that is all. Both enable also enable working offline and starting new developers or changing PCs is very easy. I thought it might be related to UAC or the firewall, but after a quick look around and I found ASP.NET Developer server not working which lead to IE won’t connect to asp.net server which had the solution. Opening up Notepad as Administrator (since I have UAC on) loading the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file and commenting out the line ::1 localhost, restart only the browser instance that failed and all is working.

Now Visual Studio does not need to run as Administrator, I do not need to configure IIS, I can have Edit and Continue and multiple workspaces all running completely independently.