Yesterday we had the first drop of the VS2008 SP1 Beta, well there is also one for TFS2008. As with the main VS2008 service pack there are loads of fixes and some new features.

Given my experiences with the VS2008 Beta I think I will be waiting for the real release before I put this near our main systems. As with any system critical beta only play with them in a sandbox!

Also Brian Harry has published a revised licensing white paper, this might well help to explain some of the common problems we all have in this area.

14 May UPDATE - Due t illness the speaker cannot make it , so this session is being rescheduled to next month. Check the XP Club site for what is on in its place

Remember tomorrow is monthly meeting of the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds.

The session is by Chris Mills a developer relations manager for  development for the Opera Browser.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session in Glasgow yesterday, I hope you found it useful.

The slides will appear on the DDS site at some point but you can find them now on the Black Marble site. There is also a web cast of a virtual identical presentation on the Extreme Programming Club site.

The noticeable difference at this event from DDD in Reading was what was going on at lunch time. The grok talks seemed far better attended than at TVP, also there was interesting Alt.Net Open Spaces style session where we had a general chat on tools and libraries which I attended.

Why did this seem to work better than at TVP?

• Was it the event was smaller?
• The layout of the venue meant it was easy to circulate?

I don't know the answer but I would like to thank the organisers for putting on such as successful event.

I look forward to the next one and hope to see a few of you  in Edinburgh on the 4th of June

Since updating to TFS 2008 we have lost our Sprint Burndown chart in eScrum, not a major problem as we use the cumulative flow in its place. However, I have eventually got round to fixing it.

It turns out the problem is down to the the way the dates for the start and end of the Sprint are converted to measure names for the main MDX query. There were both regional date format issues (mm/dd/yy as opposed to dd/mm/yy) and the fact that the MDX query was very particular over leading zeros for the end date of the range e.g. 14/4/2008 did not work but 14/04/2008 did (but this was not the case for the start date!)

The solution was to handle the dates as strings which I could force for format on, as opposed to dates. I am not sure how well this will work for others depending on regional date format. You might need to edit the RDL file a bit. However, my guess is it will cure many of the problems with missing eScrum burndown charts that forums have been putting down to warehouse corruption.

I also added a table at the bottom to help with seeing what is going on. The revised RDL file can be downloaded form this server

If you are using the TFS API within a WebApp with impersonation there is a good chance you will see the error below when you run the web site on IIS

System.Security.SecurityException: Requested registry access is not allowed.    
at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowSecurityException(ExceptionResource resource)    
at Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey.OpenSubKey(String name, Boolean writable)    
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.RegisteredServers.OpenCurrentUser(Boolean writable, Boolean shouldCreate)    
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.RegisteredServers.GetUriForServer(String serverName)    
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.RegisteredServers.GetServerKeyForServer(String serverName, String subKey, Boolean writable, Boolean shouldCreate)    

If you google for this forums tells you to add read access for the impersonated user to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers

However, this did not fix the problem. So after much fiddling and re-reading Naren's Blog on configuring WIT I looked further down the error log and saw

The Zone of the assembly that failed was:    
MyComputer    
Access to the path 'Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0\Cache' is denied.    

So I created a cache directory and added the following

<configuration>
…
<appSettings>
<add key="WorkItemTrackingCacheRoot" value="E:\FolderForCache" />
</appSettings>
</configuration>

And it leapt into life, even with the added rights in the registry removed!

So it seems the first error is a red herring.

I have just adding some Performance Counters to instrument some code and had a few issues that are worth knowing about.

I created two categories of counters using the following code:

//Create a category with a single counter
PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(
               "categoryName", "categoryDescription",
               PerformanceCounterCategoryType.SingleInstance,
               "counterName", "counterDescription");

//Create a category with more than one counter
System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationDataCollection counterCollection System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationDataCollection();
counterCollection.Add(new System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationData(
     "Name1,
     "Description1",
     PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems64));
counterCollection.Add(new System.Diagnostics.CounterCreationData(
     "Name2,
     "Description2",
     PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems64));
// Create the category and pass the collection to it.
System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(
            "multicategoryName",
            "multicategoryDescription",   
            PerformanceCounterCategoryType.SingleInstance,
            counterCollection);

The problem I had was the new performance counters did not show up correctly in PerfMon, but seemed OK from Visual Studio. In PerfMon I was seeing the single counter category OK but the multi counter category was only showing the first counter.

If I sent data to one of the multi category counters it seemed to go OK but in Perfmon I saw nothing. If I sent to the single category counter it showed up on both the single and multi graph in PerfMon.

The fix was simple, unload PerfMon  completely between tests and all is OK. Just loading the Add Counter dialog IS NOT ENOUGH.

Also it is worth calling

System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter.CloseSharedResources();

when adding or deleting categories as this removes stale data that can also be a problem.

Saw an excellent play last night, Hapgood at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. For those who have no heard if it, it is a Tom Stoppard play about spies and physics set in the late 80s.

I know of two plays that take their theme from quantum uncertainly, this one and Copenhagen, both nights out I have really enjoyed. They are plays that keep you guessing all the way as to what is really the truth (if such a thing can ever be known).

I have always liked stories within stories, one of my favourite books is the Arabian Nightmare a story in which you never truly know who is the narrator until the very end due to the layer nature of story telling.

All these go to show you never can know as much as you would hope for.

The lack of 64Bit TFS API DLLs is becoming a real pain for me. We have committed to a 64Bit server architecture for all our IIS and hence MOSS servers; both of these seem unable to WOW64 the 32bit TFS DLLs (though Cassini can!) so I cannot load any web front ends that use TFS such as eScrum or anything home grown on my main servers.

My only option is to run 32it servers as well for the primary systems. This is not too bad for IIS/ASP.NET bits, but it is not recommended to have a mixed 32/64bit frontend for MOSS.

I have to ask why is there no 64bit version of these TFS DLLs,  what the hell do they do that is processor type related?

If my understanding is correct they are just a set of wrappers that make the TFS WebServices easier to use. The TFS WebServices are not designed for third party access and I was strongly warned off trying to use them by Martin Wooward at IMTC and he should know as he is part of the team that wrote the Java/Eclipse client for TFS. He said the webservices do not provided atomic functions, so the API does a lot of work to make sure you don't corrupt the TFS system. However as it in the end the API uses the TFS WebServices it must just be making SOAP calls so why can't we have a 64Bit set of DLLs?

So is this a problem for just me? Has anyone else got interesting workarounds?

I have just uploaded the first release of my BlogWriter for Smart Devices which allows you to post new messages to blog servers that uses the MetaBlog API. My aim was to provide a LiveWriter like application for devices like my HTC PDA.

In the zip file you will find these instructions and a .CAB file. The installation process is as follows:

• Make sure you Smart Device has .NET Compact Framework 3.5 installed
• Copy the the CAB file to your smart device 
• On the smart device double click on the CAB – you will get a message about unknown publisher, say OK. The EXE and the CAB are digitally signed but Black Marble is not a known publisher (we don't have Mobile2Market certificate which is the only type that the installer can check publishers against).
• Answer the questions as to where you want to install the application.
• Once the program has been installed there should be a icon on program menu for Blog Writer, click it to run
• You see a splash screen, this should disappear after a short while and leave an empty page (this is because the blog server has not been configured yet)

• On the tools menu select Options
• Enter the URL of the community server's MetaBlog page (or any other type of blog server that support MetaBlog). In the case of CS it will be something like http://www.mydomain.co.uk/blogs/metablog.ashx
• Enter the blog name. In CS it is what is after the /blogs/ in the URL, so mine is rfennell
• Enter your login and password.
• Finally you can set if the application should auto-connect to the server on start-up. I would suggest not to auto refresh until you are happy it is working, there is a manual refresh option on the tools menu.
• Once all is setup and saved use tools/refresh option and you should see a list of your last 20 posts.

• To view a post click on it or click new post button to create a new one

• On the details page you get a browser preview, and a text editor. As I have not found a good html editor for .NET Compact framework I just use a textbox and replace a newline with a <p> when you save.
• You also get a categories list which is pulled from the server. You can assign a post to any category you want.
• When you are happy use the publish option on the post actions menu.
• Note: you also have an option to delete a post if you want.

So what is missing?

• A better HTML editor is the critical thing, I might have to write one!
• No context menus or help.
• The ability to add new categories.
• Image support - maybe linked to the PDA camera to you can blog a photo in one step.

I went to very interesting IET meeting last night entitled 'Enigma & Friends' given by John Alexander. He is a private collector of encryption machines; the bulk of his collection is currently house in the Block-B exhibit at Bletchley Park and is open to the public.

The difference between going to the museum and seeing his presentation is threefold. Firstly the you get his extensive knowledge of the subject, but I think even more interestingly hear of the adventures it takes to obtain what must be remembered were (or still are) top secret machines. And finally you get a chance to handle  the machines, probably something I will not get the chance to do again.

So what did I learn - Russian cold war cypher machines are improbably heavy, and you can buy anything on eBay!

This post has been written with a blog writer (same idea as Live Writer) that I have written for a Smart Device using the .NET Compact Framework 3.5

The reason I wrote it was I find Community Server a bit awkward to use in a web browser on a small form factor device like my HTC Cruise phone. Being able to create a post offiline just seemed an easier option.

Lets see if that is true.

I posted a while ago about my new HTC Cruise, well I am still really happy with it but I have come across a problem. I have found that from time to time I get problems trying to do a Send/Receive in Outlook Mobile via the 3G mobile phone network. Well today after a chat with Tom I spotted the pattern.

If I boot the phone I can pickup email via 3G/Internet no problems. However, if I USB active-sync the phone any further attempt to pickup email via 3G just gets a 'Connecting' status message then nothing.

It seems that the active-sync (which also does an update of the email) leaves Outlook mobile in such a state that it cannot connect via 3G, maybe URL/IP Address cache issue? Interestingly a Web Browser has no problem getting to the mail server's URL via 3G so it looks to be a problem in Outlook Mobile and not the operating system.

So the simple fix is just reboot the phone, something I have not had to do much with the HTC running Windows Mobile 6.0. My old QTek had to be rebooted a on regular basis

I will be speaking on Visual Studio for Database Professionals to the Scottish SQL usergroup on the 4th June in Edinburgh.

Update The event booking site is now available at http://www.sqlserverfaq.com/?eid=115

The details are out the for VBug event I am speaking at, it is going to be at The Castlegate, Melbourne Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 2JQ

Hope to see you there.

A busy time in the next few weeks for free community launch events for Windows 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL 2008.

This week we at Black Marble are hosting a series of three evening events (See online booking) where you can see virtually the whole set of Black Marble speakers.

On the 30th of April there will be a VBug hosted launch event in Newcastle where I, Rik and Iain will be speaking.

Hope to see you one or more of these events.