Recently I ran into an error installing TFS2008 SP1. The environment is an upgraded TFS2005 install, had been running OK and updates went fine. This update just did not install.

Error 29106.Team Foundation Report Server Configuration: Access to the SQL Reporting Services databases could not be granted. Verify that the Team Foundation data-tier server has enough free disk space.

In the end the solution appeared in the log file, located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Local Settings\Temp. The file stated

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: User, group, or role 'Domain\TFS_AT$' already exists in the current database.

The solution appeared to be to remove the computer account from logins and all databases in SQL Server on the Team Foundation Server Data Tier. After that SP1 created the account again and installed fine.

Wow, that were two impressive days. There are so many ways that partners are extending Visual Studio, it is really inspiring. My presentation was one of two about how to Extend TFS. The conference ended by a bunch of partners getting 4 minutes each to present their solution: T4 Editors, testing and performance tools, game factories, controls, etc.

Are you interesting in VSX, check out this site and this book, that was handed out at the conference.

Today is the first day of the the Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference, about which I wrote some time ago.

There are some great sessions about Visual Studio, Shell, DSLs and VSTS, most of which are focused on product developers. This morning Rico Mariano, the Visual Studio Chief Architect, presented the kick off and talked about his pillars for the next Visual Studio versions. While Dev10 is underway, long term planning for Dev11 and Dev12 has already started. In general he said the teams will focus on Visual Studio being extensible (very relevant to this audience), scalable (Rico is a performance guy), modern, connected and frugal. The message was presented with some great anecdotes on the side from his years of experience on related teams since late 80s.

Each next version of Visual Studio should also be good looking, focused on a certain group of end users and obviously support the latest hardware and software.

Good stuff! Session decks are posted here

Last saturday the Dutch code camp was organized by three user groups. There was a good crowd and especially the number of MVPs was impressive. My talk was on Modeling In VSTS Rosario. I demonstrated the publicly available Rosario CTP12 VPC in which you can see the new Architecture Explorer and UML diagrams. We had good discussions about why things are implemented in a certain way and good feedback that will go back to the VSTS product teams through our regular Rosario TAP calls.

I asked the organization for a code camp logo to show on blogs, etc. The below image is great, except that our code camp was in the MIC in Barneveld and luckily no real camping was involved...

In three weeks the first-ever public VSX Developer Conference will kick off. At the moment I am preparing my talk on TFS extensibility, primarily focused on partners who are creating marketable additions for TFS. If you want to attend, you still can: The fee is only $100...

There is a lot of stuff to tell and to demonstrate and so little time. The release of Service Pack 1 and the corresponding SDK have brought plenty interesting stuff:

VSExtensibilitySample: This new TFS sample provides an example of creating a Visual Studio add-in that interacts with the Version Control user interface of Team Explorer.  The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of such an add-in.

RichClientCustomControl: This new TFS sample provides an example of creating Work Item Tracking custom controls that work within Team Explorer.  The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of custom controls as well as a separate document that describes how to write custom controls that can be used within the Team Server Web Access environment.

How often do you search your development machine for code you developed before? Very often, right? And how often do you look for code on the web? Also very often, I assume. Search in Vista (or Windows Server 2008) are very powerful and so are the known search engines on the web.

So what if you wanted code that other people in your organisation created? That is where you can use Microsoft Search Server!

Search Server is based on Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and has very simple yet powerful additions to search various content sources such as websites and file shares. To get started with searching the source code in your Team Foundation Server:

• Install Search Server
• Create a file share on a server
• Get the latest version of your TFS version control to the file share
• In Search Server Central Administration create a new content source and point it to the file share
• Add new file types, of files you want to search such as .cs, to the content index
• Start a full crawl on the content source

Now you are ready to go: Open the search page and enter something to search for such as "Page_Load". On the result page you will get links to the files in which your search string was found. Nice, right?

So next there can be loads of additions: You can create an integrated search within Visual Studio, apply effective TFS permissions, make search results open in Visual Studio, etc.

Yesterday I was at the Dutch developer days. It was a great day with content sessions during the day and more fun sessions during geek night. Due to work and other appointments I am unable to be at devdays today. If you missed it this year, you should attend next year. See why here http://devdays.nl/

My session was on "Softwarekwaliteit verhogen door beter te testen met VSTS". While hosting a testing session for a developer audience can be challenging, this one seemed to appeal: the room was packed! Thanks to all for attending. The session was recorded on video so I am sure it will be available on the web soon. If you have any questions, drop me a mail.

Slightly related to this subject is a post I saw this morning announcing Pex (Program EXploration). Pex is a new project from Microsoft Research that "generates Unit Tests from hand-written Parameterized Unit Tests through Automated Exploratory Testing based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution". Sounds very promising.

See the announcement http://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/archive/2008/05/23/first-public-release-of-pex-automated-exploratory-testing-for-net.aspx and the MS Research site http://research.microsoft.com/pex/

Surely you have heard of Enterprise Library: The bundled Microsoft application blocks redelivered in a set of reusable components to help development teams focus on business functionality instead of low level technical plumbing such as data access, logging, etc. Consistency, extensibility, ease of use and integration have been goals from the start and it is being improved in every release. If you are not using it on your current solution you probably have a good reason not to.

It is easy to start working with Enterprise Library since the download contains a lot:

1. Binaries, which you can use in your application, and the configuration editor, which enables you to configure settings for each application block in a graphical user interface.

2. Very useful documentation available through Visual Studio help containing background info on EntLib, how to get started, how to develop with EntLib, its design and detailed descriptions of each block.

3. Source that you can optionally install. If you do, you get source code of all (42) EntLib projects and quickstarts for each application block.

Before, you could get Entlib 3.1 to work with Visual Studio 2008, but that took some effort. Installing it and then making it appear in VS was not straightforward. Now the waiting is over:

Enterprise Library 4 can easily be used in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512464.aspx Also EntLib got better performance, WMI 2.0 support and a few minor fixes. But wait, that is not all.... The new kid in town is Unity Application Block!

Unity is a lightweight dependency injection container, which facilitates loosely coupled object development and creation and extensible caching. http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/cc468366(en-us).aspx It can be used standalone too in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. The Stoplight and EventBroker quickstarts give a good overview of the possibilities of Unity. Once you get to know the Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control are very powerful patterns, nicely described here Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern.