Vancouver TechFest 2009 – Presentation
My presentation at the Vancouver TechFest this weekend went fairly well, all things considered. I’d hoped I would have more time for an in-depth demo of the various ways to integrate business data into SharePoint 2007, but sadly I was limited to a demonstration of the Business Data Catalog consuming data from a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 implementation.
If you are interested, you can view the slides here:
Business Data Integration with SharePoint (1.4 MB)
I believe the recordings of the presentations will be posted on www.vancouvertechfest.com, so check there if you would like to see and hear the presentation.
In: Events, SharePoint · Tagged with: Burntsand, Microsoft, Presentation, SharePoint, TechFest, Vancouver
Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2 Experience
My experiences with Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2 have been exellent for the most part, but I just spent the last few days trying to troubleshoot a client installation that just wasn’t working. Everything installed fine (as usual), but then something really bizarre happened … I couldn’t create team projects! The following error would occur (originally posted on MSDN – http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfsprerelease/thread/6fb067e5-f0cd-4bf2-a277-99958a445b12 by my team mate Ryan Jaeger):
2009-11-06T11:57:51 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Creating report: Bug Status
2009-11-06T11:57:52 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Setting data sources for report: /TfsReports/DefaultCollection/TestTFS19/Bugs/Bug Status
2009-11-06T11:57:52 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Creating report: Bug Trends
2009-11-06T11:57:53 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Setting data sources for report: /TfsReports/DefaultCollection/TestTFS19/Bugs/Bug Trends
2009-11-06T11:57:53 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Creating report: Reactivations
2009-11-06T11:57:53 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Setting data sources for report: /TfsReports/DefaultCollection/TestTFS19/Bugs/Reactivations
2009-11-06T11:57:53 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Creating report: Build Quality Indicators
2009-11-06T11:57:54 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Setting data sources for report: /TfsReports/DefaultCollection/TestTFS19/Builds/Build Quality Indicators
2009-11-06T11:57:54 | Module: Rosetta | Thread: 14 | Creating report: Build Success Over Time
—begin Exception entry—
Time: 2009-11-06T11:57:54
Module: Engine
Event Description: TF30162: Task “BuildTask” from Group “Build” failed
Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException
Exception Message: TF203013: The path C:\Users\CARMDS~2\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp8F32.tmp is in the DOS (8.3) short path format and is not supported. Enter a full path to the item and try again.
Exception Details:
Stack Trace:
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.Build.ProjectComponentCreator.ExecuteInternal(ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml, Boolean validationOnly)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.Build.ProjectComponentCreator.Execute(ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.ProjectCreationEngine.TaskExecutor.PerformTask(IProjectComponentCreator componentCreator, ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.ProjectCreationEngine.RunTask(Object taskObj)
– Inner Exception –
Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildServerException
Exception Message: TF203013: The path C:\Users\CARMDS~2\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp8F32.tmp is in the DOS (8.3) short path format and is not supported. Enter a full path to the item and try again.
Stack Trace:
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TeamFoundationClientProxyBase.ProcessHttpResponse(HttpWebResponse response, Stream responseStream, WebException webException, XmlReader& xmlResponseReader)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TeamFoundationClientProxyBase.ExecWebServiceRequest(HttpWebRequest request, XmlWriter requestXml, String methodName, HttpWebResponse& response)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildWebService.AddProcessTemplates(ProcessTemplate[] processTemplates)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildServer.SaveProcessTemplates(IProcessTemplate[] processTemplates)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.Build.ProjectComponentCreator.ExecuteInternal(ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml, Boolean validationOnly)
– end Inner Exception –
– Inner Exception –
Exception Type: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException
Exception Message: TF203013: The path C:\Users\CARMDS~2\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp8F32.tmp is in the DOS (8.3) short path format and is not supported. Enter a full path to the item and try again.
SoapException Details: <detail xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” ExceptionMessage=”TF203013: The path C:\Users\CARMDS~2\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp8F32.tmp is in the DOS (8.3) short path format and is not supported. Enter a full path to the item and try again.” BaseExceptionName=”Microsoft.TeamFoundation.InvalidPathException” />
Stack Trace:
– end Inner Exception –
— end Exception entry —
As you can see, it’s not a terribly useful error. We scoured the event logs, trace logs … everything, but we couldn’t find any more information. Time was ticking and we needed a solution fast, so … I decided to build up a new mock environment to see if we could replicate the issue. After hours of tedius installation and environment alignement, sure enough, we couldn’t replicate the issue! The team projects created perfectly in the mock environment.
After breaking the issue down further we realized that the only difference between the production environment and the mock environment was the user accounts we used for the services. This also happened to be cryptically referenced in the error line:
The path C:\Users\CARMDS~2\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp8F32.tmp is in the DOS (8.3) short path format and is not supported. Enter a full path to the item and try again.
The main difference between the account names in production and in the mock environment was that the production names were 13 characters long, and the mock environment names were only 6 characters long. AH HA! We decided to switch the TFS Service account to using a shortner name and guess what … everything worked! The team projects created properly and all was well.
The obvious lesson here is … beware of beta software, and plan time for finding and dealing with bugs. ; )
In: Development, Team Foundation Server, Team System · Tagged with: Beta, Microsoft, Team System, Visual Studio
Vancouver TechFest 2009
If you are in Vancouver on November 21, 2009, and are a techno-geek like myself, don’t forget to attend the Vancouver TechFest 2009. Vancouver TechFest is a free, single-day, community-driven conference covering a bunch of Microsoft technology areas specifically targeted to developers and IT professionals.
Burntsand is a Platinum Sponsor for the event, and I’ll be presenting Business Data Integration using SharePoint 2007. The presentation will cover some hard-core integration scenarios, and will demonstrate a bunch of useful real-world samples.
I hope to see you there.
In: Development, Events, SharePoint · Tagged with: Burntsand, Conference, Microsoft, Presentation, TechFest, Vancouver
What's new with Visual Studio Team System 2010 and MSDN?
I’ll be jointly presenting with Microsoft at an upcoming Vancouver event about the new features of Visual Studio Team System 2010, and the changes in VSTS and MSDN licensing. If you are in the area and interested in learning more about this, register for the event and come learn about some of these exciting changes:
What’s new with Visual Studio Team System 2010 and MSDN (PDF w/links for registration)
In: Development, Events, Team Foundation Server, Team System, Visual Studio · Tagged with: Microsoft, MSDN, Presentation, Team System, Visual Studio
SharePoint 2010 Development Workstation
With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 I have been working with my team at Burntsand to determine what the optimal development workstation (laptop) should look like. The key planning point, of course, is that SharePoint 2010 only supports 64bit instances.
We’ve tried a number of combinations of hardware and software, and we have finally solidified on using Windows 7 64bit running VMWare Workstation 6.5. For our server hosted instances we will be using Windows Server 2008 R2 with VMWare Server (mainly for consistency and portability of virtual machines).
So, why not use Hyper-V? We struggled with this question a lot. We are a Microsoft technology focused team, but ultimately the VMWare solution provided us with a more efficient and consistent development platform. In order to use Hyper-V you need to be running Windows Server 2008, which meant that we would need to install Windows Server 2008 on our laptops. While it is possible to create a Windows Server 2008 workstation, it isn’t a simple, or even 100% effective option. On top of this, the whole team loves Windows 7 and would prefer to use it over Windows Server 2008 (especially given that we could only get our Bluetooth devices to run with Windows 7 – despite all the available hacks).
The downside with Windows 7 is that the built in virtualization functionality doesn’t support 64bit guests, and it lacks a bunch of the key features we’ve come to love such as snapshots. VMWare Workstation not only supports 64bit guests, but it comes with all of the features that we’ve come to depend on for virtualized SharePoint development. Perhaps Microsoft will change this with a future release, but for now … it’s VMWare all the way.
In: Development, SharePoint · Tagged with: Hyper-V, SharePoint, Virtualization, VMWare
What is Thinkium?
If Thought was an element, it would be called Thinkium (Tk). This blog is all about the element of Thought and how it can be applied in everyday life.
