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Umbraco Asia Pac meetup

Friday, 3 July 2009 by Karl Kopp

Aaron just got back from Codegarden 09, so he thought we should have a meetup to discuss all things Umbraco. Details are listed on his blog:

http://www.aaron-powell.com/blog/july-2009/calling-auspac-umbracians.aspx

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iPhone tethering in the field

Friday, 26 June 2009 by Karl Kopp

Waiting at the airport in Canberra gave me a chance to quickly try out the iPhone tethering support in the field, and I must say, I'm pretty impressed. Connection was easy on my Windows 7 MacBook Pro, and the speed has been great! No need for a separate 3G dongle, one less thing I need to carry :)

Only downside is the bad coffee - Hudsons just can't make a decent cup.

Posted using Live Writer via my tethered 3G iPhone

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Security Essentials Beta first impressions

Wednesday, 24 June 2009 by Karl Kopp

Since I installed Windows 7 RC a week or two ago, I haven't installed an anti-virus application. In part because I am very careful what I run on my machine, but also in part because I was keen to try the new Microsoft Security Essentials Beta that was released today. So I filled in the Connect survey, downloaded an install MSE this morning. A few of my first impressions:

  • The installation was very quick, and the whole application was only a 4.5mb download, was smaller than some other anti-virus applications I've used before.
  • A nice touch (that is very unusual in today's Interweb) is that it didn't ask to install any junk - didn't want to add bookmarks in my browser, change my default browser or search provider, install extra toolbars - it just installed the anti-virus application. Nice work!
  • On a clean install of Windows 7 with the full Office 2007 suite, Visual Studio 2010, and some other apps, a Quick Scan took 7:12 minutes - not bad!
  • All the default settings looked reasonable to me so I would be happy to recommend it to Mother Kopp for example and know it won't suck large amounts of CPU or RAM.

All in all, first 20 minutes have been a positive exercise, and its nice to get one Important Message cleared from my Action Centre. Now to clear up some space on my USB drive for a full backup :)

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Augmented reality

Wednesday, 17 June 2009 by Karl Kopp

This is really nice - augmented reality is the use of real world video footage overlayed with some real time 3D graphics. See the demo:

Love the use of Skittles as proximity bombs :)

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TFS: The case of the phantom Build Agent

Thursday, 11 June 2009 by Karl Kopp

We have used Team Foundation Server (TFS) for a number of years now across many of the divisions of the organisation, including the development teams in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Shanghai for many years. We use it for our work item tracking, source control, managing our build processes and storing project documentation. We are also in the process of finalising using TFS for running workflow in all other parts of the business, and I hope to write further details about that in the coming weeks.

So as I was investigating an issue with our TFS Warehouse (another post) being stale, I noticed we were receiving a whole bunch TFS Build warnings in the event log (over 150 every hour!) on our main TFS install (TFS08). The warning message was:

TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension

Exception Message: The file '/Build/v2.0/AgentService.asmx' does not exist. (type HttpException)

So while I was waiting for the TFS Warehouse to rebuild (read: a LONG time), I dug a little deeper.

First, I jumped onto the TFS08 server, and opened into IIS Manager to see if the actual file existed. It didn't. So I jumped onto a build agent box (BUILDER) and saw that it didn't have the path /Build/v2.0/AgentServices.asmx either. Strange.

So Aaron asked on Stack Overflow whether anyone had any details, and Martin Woodward answered asked a few more questions. One thing that got my attention is that the URL is made available through WCF by the Team Foundation Build service, so is not actually a physical file. Looking at the services in TFS08, I saw that no Build services were installed (all building is done on dedicated build boxes like BUILDER) so there was obviously a misconfiguration somewhere.

We have over 500 projects on our TFS08 server, and it was going to be time consuming to open each Team Project in Team Explorer and check the Build Agent by using the Build / Manage Build Agent dialog.

So I RDP'd to the TFS08 DB server and opened the TfsBuild database to look for a rogue agent, and found that someone had somehow configured up a Build Agent and pointed it back to the TFS08 server that had no Build services installed (I believe this was configured on an old TFS05 server that was decommissioned and the TFS08 server picked up its old name). The MachineName of the entry in tbl_BuildAgent table pointed to the TFS08 machine, not BUILDER.

So I grabbed the GroupId (15) and ran the query below on the tbl_BuildGroup to find some details:

SELECT     GroupId, TeamProject, GroupPath, GroupName, Description
FROM         tbl_BuildGroup
WHERE     (GroupId = 15)

This showed me the TeamProject 'URI' for the TeamProject (vstfs:///Classification/TeamProject/9c180aa7-e3e8-45b4-8e45-cb4668bab508) which I could then use the UUID part to find the project name using this query on the TfsIntegration table:

SELECT     project_id, project_name, state, last_update
FROM         tbl_projects
WHERE     (project_id = '9c180aa7-e3e8-45b4-8e45-cb4668bab508')

This gave me the Project Name. It was then a simple case of deleting the build agent from the project configuration using Team Explorer, and the errors stopped instantly :)
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