Shut-Up and Smile

At the end of this month, I'll be flying down to Sydney, Australia, for VSLive! [0]. Always one of my favorite places to go; really looking forward to the trip. At VSLive!, I'll be doing a talk on caching and an all-day workshop on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System [1].

In addition, I'll be speaking at the Sydney .NET Users Group [2] on Wednesday night, November 30, on Team System.

Finally, on Monday, December 5, I'll be hanging out with my friends at SSW [3], talking about, you guessed it, Team System at one of their famous Tech Breakfasts [4].

So if you live in the area or if you're going to be in that neck of the woods, stop on by and let's chat and maybe have a pint.

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Updated links.

[0] http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/vslive/2005/au/
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/
[2] http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/NETUG/Default.aspx
[3] http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/
[4] http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/events/SSWTechBreakfast.aspx

I'm in San Francisco, CA, right now Launch 2005 with AC/DC's For Those About to Rock blaring through the speakers. Rock the Launch is the theme.

Verizon wireless is great. Let's see what happens.

Update 1: Cheap Trick (yes this Cheap Trick) opened the show Live!

Update 2: they're showing a video of a bunch of RD's giving video testimonials--Adam Cogan was one. And Billy Hollis asks Are You Ready to Rock?

Update 3: Ballmer comes out, in a suit! Yikes!

Update 4: Prashant Sridharan, Group Product Manager for Visual Studio 2005 is showing SQL Server 2005, Team System, and more--in fact he showed Visual Basic 2005 code--right on!

Update 5: The president of Intel is up on stage with Ballmer talking about how Intel with Microsoft and DELL have broken the $1 per TPC barrier. Cool. Also, they mentioned how they're moving virtualization on to the chip. Over the next year this should really make using products like Virtual PC/Server that much better. Especially when they add hypervisor into the OS. They're showing a 5 9's Unisys box--less than 22 minutes of downtime a year. Sweet. I wonder if I can get the wife to let me sell the house for one of those? (Just kidding dear).

Update 6: added some hyperlinks.

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If you're going to install Team Foundation Server, you need to read the great install guide [0] that Rob Caron [1] and friends have worked up. Let me rephrase that, you must. I've been installing this product tons over the last year and I still use the guide because they're always adding notes and tweaks to make your life easier. Not to mention the product gets better (like no need for ADAM).

In building a single machine version (where EVERYTHING--domain controller, data tier, app tier, build server, and client), I was running into security issues. The solution was to make the TFSSERVICE and TFSREPORTS accounts members of the BUILTIN\Administrators group. Naturally Active Directory domain controllers are "special" relative to regular servers and client machines. So, while the install guide says the service accounts should not be Administrators, on a TFS box in single machine mode with Active Directory, that's just the way it needs to be (unless you want to figure out all the areas that need to be adjusted for each service account). Normally, I might want to spend the time to figure this out. But I won't. Why? Because no sane person or company should be running TFS this way. It's for demos, test, and just playing around. Period.

That also means if you're evaluating TFS, you really need to build out a test domain (real or virtual) with multiple tiers.

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[0] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E54BF6FF-026B-43A4-ADE4-A690388F310E&displaylang=en
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/default.aspx

I've used Groove for a long time. But Groove's got issues, espcially with large sync'd folders. Recently, I was unable to keep syncing a folder on one of my boxes. Nothing would work. Can't relink it for nothing. And, I don't have time to pave this particular hard drive. So, I'd been longing for an alternative. I read on Scott Hanselman's blog [0] about FolderShare [1].

I bought the Pro Edition and LOVE IT.

Well today, I found out that MSFT is buying FolderShare [2] (also here [3]). On one hand it's cool. This means the sofware will be around for a while. On the other ahnd, there goes another nice ISV. Oh well, as long as my bits continue to work well, I'll be happy.

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[0] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/OverwhelmedAndEnamoredWithFolderShare.aspx
[1] http://www.foldershare.com/
[2] http://www.foldershare.com/info/company/aboutUs.php?
[3] http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.asp?Symbol=US:MSFT&Feed=PR&Date=20051103&ID=5251087

Mark Russinovich has a great post [0] (via Larkware [1]) about Sony/BMG's CD DRM for the Van Zant brothers Get Right with the Man. Read it and be very annoyed. What if this was your system? DRM that looks like, smells like, malware.

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[0] http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html
[1] http://www.larkware.com/dg4/TheDailyGrind744.html

I just built a new VPC for Team Foundation Server (TFS) Beta 3 Refresh (single machine, Active Directory mode) on Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, SP1.

Once I had everything installed, I tried to create a new Team Project. However, it failed with an error related to a permissions failure in creating the SharePoint team site. I then fired up a web browser and tried to access http://localhost. Instead of getting the default SharePont site, I instead was greeted with a dialog asking for my user name and password. Not good. Providing a valid name/password pair didn't work. I check a couple of settings, making sure IIS was using NTLM, etc. I then started poking around in my event logs.

I noticed a number of errors in the System Event Log like this:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {BA126AD1-2166-11D1-B1D0-00805FC1270E} to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

I clicked the help link (which actually turned out to be helpful to some degree). Searching for the GUID provided the name Network Connection Manager Class. That seemed a bit odd. It was then that I remembered I'd had seen a similar error on a different VPC that was also was Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, SP1. The previous day, I had installed Team Suite RTM, but no TFS. Looking in DCOM Config, I didn't see a package for Network Connection Manager Class. But, there was the IIS Admin Service (the problem AppID from the other machine), which has an AppID of {A9E69610-B80D-11D0-B9B9-00A0C922E750}. So, I adjusted the Launch and Activation Permissions for IIS Admin Service to include Network Service. I gave it Local Launch and Local Activation (see figure below).

Once I did this, I bounced IIS with IISRESET and then tired to access http://localhost. Bingo! It worked.

Back in Visual Studio, I tried to create a Team Project and magic, it worked.

I need to spend some time figuring out why NETWORK SERVICE didn't have the correct permissions, but for now, I'm just glad things are working. Hope this helps someone else.

Update: I looked up the AppID that Network Connection Manager Class pointed to--it ended up being listed as netman in DCOM Config. I adjusted its permissions just like above and now am no longer having errors in the Event Log. That said things are not 100% happy. Second update to follow.

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