I'm at PDC09 this week in LA. I'm looking forward to playing with the new VS 2010 and TFS 2010 features, and taking a peek at Azure. If you're @PDC and follow my blog, drop me a line.

Today at 1:30EST, watch Sara Ford of CodePlex and VS Power Toys fame show off some cool Visual Studio tricks and tip.

I've been testing this hotfix for about a week, and it has cured a good chunk of my usual VS2008 crashes. Specifically, if you undock any windows withing the IDE, or change the layout, VX2008 tests to crash the next time you enter debug mode. I tend to change my layout a lot when I switch between working on C# mid-tier code, and into Data Dude to work on data generation configuration, so this one hit me a lot!

Download the hotfix here: KB960075

An updated release of TSWA 2008 SP1 is out.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=136577

This release contains a important security update. It should be a priority to update any TSWA site, but especially those exposed externally to the Internet.

This is a full release, not just a patch, so you'll have to uninstall and reinstall the updated version. When you uninstall the current version you will have the option to keep the existing website and the current configuration files in place. Install the updated version to the same web site and folder, then replace the web.config file with the saved web.config.old file.

The VSTS team has also released a white paper discussing the scalability of the TSWA Power Tool site. If you have a large user base for TSWA, you'll want to check this out.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=139762

Happy new year!

Here's a fun one. I was trying to turn Code Coverage on for a large solution today, and when I opened up LocalTestRun.testrunconfig, all was well until I tried to change to the Code Coverage section. The window would disappear and throw me back to the IDE every time. This was on VS2008 Team Suite with SP1 with the GDR installed.

Turns out it's a Data Dude GDR issue. I was able to temporarily remove my GDR database project from the solution, and the problem went away. Made my .testrunconfig file changes, undid the checkout on the .sln file to revert the database project back in, and checked in the updated LocalTestRun.testrunconfig file. Good to go! I can now see how dismal our current code coverage is.

I hope this saves someone a headache.

So here's an obscure one. I was getting the post's title as an error when trying to install the Scrum for Team System template on a new TFS 2008 server.

I tracked it down to the fact that this particular TFS server has multiple IP addresses, and I had set up the default web site (where I was letting the Scrum template install its services) set to one of those IP (the one our DNS points the TFS2008 FGDN at). Temporarily setting this back to All Unassigned (and juggling a few port numbers on other sites around to allow me to do this) fixed the problem. It has something to with with how the MSI installer was trying to create the new virtual directory in the Default Web Site.

The first CTP of Visual Studio 2010 (formerly codenamed Rosario) is available for download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=en

The download is 11 parts long, @ around 700MB each, and extract into a Virtual PC/Virtual Server virtual hard drive (VHD) and machine image.

I'm looking forward to getting play with this early preview release in anticipation for what I hope to be a gold release this time next year (I'm just speculating, I don't have any inside knowledge on a release date).