Want to use this short post as sort of planning slate for some things I want to do, loosely defined as goals, for the current month of May 2010 in the realm of training (in diverse formats) and some posts I want to write which in themselves would imply some training and thought organization exercise.

I recently completed the process of deploying TFS 2010.  Used mainly as a production SCM but also leveraging some basic ALM features.  This included conversion from Visual Source Safe, bug & issue item tracking and sprint tasks planning & reporting.  I want to “document” that process and highlight some of the gotchas that I went through, and the dos and don’t that I gathered from my experience. I think they’d add value to anyone else looking to do just that: Deploy TFS 2010 as a source control repository, migrate projects and get the groove going to plan and track your development projects.  I think a critical part of this process is indeed the planning phase, as the execution is pretty straight forward once you have a good solid base plan.

Sometime in the next 2 weeks, i will be rebuilding my ESXi box, because the PS took a crapper and I was just waiting for an excuse to upgrade the iron anyways.  As it was this is 3.5 environment because the proc was an oldie but goodie 32bit.  Looking to migrate to ESXi 4.  I am running 2 instances of Server 2003, 2 of Server 2008 and I will now look to add 2008 R2.  Here I ran my labs, and most recently had my TFS environment.  Great excuse to do it all over again if I wanted to, but for now it is just a host box swap keeping the VMs as they are.

Videos, podcasts, screencasts, MIX10 content I haven’t assimilated, and hopefully get suckered into it enough to justify a yearly subscription to tekpub.

I will attend the 2 day WebCamp event in Chicago over June 11th and 12th.  Suffice it to say, this is a great chance to learn from others including industry and technology leaders at Microsoft.  Topics include ASP.NET MVC, EF, JQuery, IIS, etc.  Great stuff.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I am considering, and haven’t yet decided, working on a worthy submission to Thomson Reuter’s mobile app contest, which they named The StreepApps Challenge .  I think I can convince my buddy Benny to go in with me on this project and if so, we are half way there.

All of this while I embrace the search and quest for a new full time role.  This time I am not looking for a job, I am looking for a home amongst those that are “my peeps”, those that appreciate what I bring to the table, people whom I can actually learn from… an environment that generates “good” stress.

On the path to my new “8 to 6” home, I am hoping to get my hands filthy dirty with some good code, good problems to solve, great challenges that push my limits and all nighters that leave you with a smile on your face.

So ok, slight inaccuracy in the post tile, because May…be some of the things that are listed here I’ll be doing in June.

I was made aware of this error, after some coworkers used a very simple batch file I put together that leveraged the tf.exe command line TFS tool, to do something as simple as check out a known set of files and check them back in after doing some required processing, all in one step.

Before I put together the batch file, this was a very tedious process as you can imagine... checking out a number of files each from a different location, work on them, and then check them back in... a LOT of mouse clicks.  The batch file was the obvious solution... but I digress...

The error was encountered by some using the file, and it appears to be an issue when one has multiple TFS WORKSPACEs setup, and/or the cache is out of date/sync.

The solution is a combination of steps:

1) If at all possible remove the duplicate WORKSPACE, and keep one, especially if like in this case the duplicate WORKSPACE was identical to the other as a result of these developers getting a new box.

2) If you don't have duplicate WORKSPACES or you have more than one WORKSPACE that you need defined, then it maybe that your TFS WORKSPACE cache needs to be refreshed.  To do so, run the following line at the command prompt: 

c:\>tf.exe workspaces /s:<server URL> 

Where the <server URL> is the URL to your TFS server. 

I haven't and probably won't try to reproduce it to confirm, but I've had all positive feedback that this resolves the issue 100% of the time.