Submitted another bug to Microsoft, this time regarding the fact that you cannot edit a SharePoint document opened from a work item in the VS IDE. After I submitted a screen capture of the bug yesterday Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in VS ALM 2010. The good news is that they will fix this in VS vNext where “we now launch the external browser rather than the internal VS browser when opening hyperlinks”. Until vNext arrives we will have to use work arounds. Fortunately there are several of those. Because the source of the problem is the VS internal browser opening the document in any other way you can think of does not cause this bug to appear.
Category: Troubleshooting
TFS Power Tool bug fix
Back in October I submitted a bug to Connect regarding the Process Editor and the fact that it makes background changes to the WIT xml files without notifying the user. Yesterday Microsoft posted a reply that this will be fixed in the next version of TFS Power Tools. When the next version will be released is not known, but February and Q1 2011 has been mentioned. I can’t wait, it is going to save me some serious headaches when editing work items!
Misleading error message when setting up TFS Warehouse
Encountered a stupid error message yesterday. Had a TFS 2010 instance where reporting services had been disabled. When trying to enable it again we got an error message saying “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. SQL instance was correct, database names (Tfs_Warehouse and Tfs_Analysis) were correct and I had a valid username and password for the TFSService account. However, as the original installation was done properly, using the TFSReports account for reporting services, we got this error message when trying to re-enable reporting services.
Now, even though the error was “correct”, I would have appreciated an error message that was a little bit more informative…
ASP.Net vulnerability affects TFS
All versions of TFS are affected by the ASP.net security vulnerability discovered recently. Brian Harry has blogged about this and attached a document on how to work around this problem until a patch is released. If you are a TFS admin you have some work to do…
Another reason for moving to TFS 2010
Recently one of my clients (who uses TFS 2008) encountered the TF14083 warning when merging two branches. This is the warning message:
The item ‘{0}’ has a pending merge from the current merge operation, please resolve and check in the current merge and merge again to pick up this change.
In most cases this is nothing to worry about, all you need to do is just what it says in the message. Resolve, check in and merge again.
But a cautious user might start to think along the lines of “so,what happens if the second merge fails? I’ve already checked in the first part of the merge!”. The simple answer would be that you do a rollback to the previous changeset using TFS 2008 Power Tools.
However, in TFS 2008 the rollback will only rollback the actual changes but the merge history will not be affected and this will cause trouble when you try to redo the merge operation as TFS believes the two branches have already been merged. You can probably solve this dilemma by doing the merge using TFS command line tool and use the /force option but by now most people are thinking something along the lines of “this is stupid, TFS should be able to handle all this”.
And if you move to TFS 2010 it can! Not only has one of the main reasons for the error above been fixed, but rollback is now part of the standard TFS command line tools and has an option for keeping merge history or not. There, another good reason why you should move to TFS 2010! 
Jesfer brought back to life
I finally found some time to get my blog up and running again. Even found a nice theme to use. Needs some tweeking but it is good enough for the moment.
I have no idea why my blog died on me (bored from inactivity maybe) but instead of debugging it I choose to just move on to BlogEnginge.Net 1.5. Exporting settings and posts was more or less a matter of copy/paste 🙂
TFS Windows Shell Extensions
So, here is the short review of TFS Windows Shell Extensions in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools.
Me and a couple of colleagues installed it… and it is actually quite nice. Now that I have it installed I dont think I want to work without it 
You get all the basic TFS source control related actions in the explorer window, no more, no less. The name is still a few letters too long for my liking 
One of my colleagues ran into some trouble with TFS Windows Shell Extensions though. The icon overlays in explorer did not show up properly. Turns out there was a “simple” explanation…
“Windows Shell has a hard limit of 15 registered Icon Overlays and reserves 4 for its own use. If you do not see your TFS controlled files and folders displayed with these overlays but the context menus are displaying correctly you may have run into this limit. The only workaround is to uninstall one of the applications that is using the available slots or disabling its shell integration.”
No big deal, as long as you know which application to uninstall…
Moving from VS2005 to VS2008
This is actually really easy as long as every developer on your project makes the move simultaneously. If not, well, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
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VS2008 will convert your solution and project files even when you stay in .Net 2.0. Converted solution files can not be opened by VS2005. Project files can still be opened (you’ll get a warning but that is all). This means you’ll have to work with two versions of your .sln files, one for VS2008 and one for VS2005.
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If you’ve used Microsoft’s Test Project template for writing unit test etc, the reference to ”Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework” will have changed in the conversion, breaking the project for VS2005. This reference will have to be manually changed back and forth depending on what VS version developers use.
That’s it so far, but I’m sure there are some other pitfalls out there waiting for me 😛
Bleeding colors
It is almost two years since I encountered this problem but since I have still not found any good explanations I’ll just make a post about it myself and hope those who could use this info find their way in here.
Problem:
.Net web-applikation using nested html tables which in turn uses stylesheets to set background color, font, font-size and so on. For some unknown reason the background color bleed outward/inward.
Fix:
Set the actual html background color attribute to any color you like in all places where your stylesheet setting includes a background color. This stops the colors from bleeding. The stylesheet background color overrides the html attribute so you’ll get the color you want…
Comment:
This might not sound like the perfect solution, but it works. We stumbled across it by accident after trying everything we could think of and everything related we could find on the internet.
Enterprise Library Pitfall
I was recently asked to bugfix an application. The bug was eaasy enough to fix, just add two lines of code, no big deal. In order to build the application I had to install Enterprise Library 3.1 and re-reference a few .dll files in it. Also no big deal, done it before with previous versions of Enterprise Library… but it turns out i stumbled right into a configuration pitfall!
Short version for those who dont want to read Tom Hollander‘s blog about Avoiding configuration pitfalls with incompatible copies of Enterprise Library:
If you install Enterprise Library 3.x a go with all default options/choices, you end up with two sets of .dll files. If you have to re-reference these files in a project and use the wrong .dll your code will compile but throws an exception in runtime… referencing the other set of dll files will solve the problem (but might cause new problems as well).
jesfer 