Fixing the Check-in policy failure error.

Hi all,

If you are one of the lucky few who get the annoying message saying something like “TFS policy failure when checking in” even when you have selected a work item and given appropriate comments(like “change”). I might have a fix for it.

I was able to fix it by installing the TFS power tools.

How to verify the issue?

1. From your Team Explorer, right click the “Paxit” node, choose “Team Project Settings” choose the “Source Control..” option.
2. Select the “Check-in Policy” tab, in the list of policies, select the “Change set Comments Policy”, you would notice an error message box to the effect of the policy implementing dll not being installed properly.

1. The message might ask you to register the dll correctly

Don’t try to fix any registry entry, just install the TFS power tools which installs the change set comments policy addin along with other useful tools.

Here is where you find the download for the power tools. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/tfs2008/bb980963.aspx

Good luck

-Yogesh

My initial thoughts on Small Basic and my kids experience using it

Hi all, its been a few months since I updated my blog and I am glad to break the break with a good topic I am excited about.

Kids. Actually programming tool for kids to use. I was browsing Microsofts website recently and stumbled upon a page for Small Baisc. My initial thought was, “yet another basic for the masses”. My initial impression was not all that good, the page claimed this app would help kids start programming.

Well a software developer by trade, I have seen my share of different programming languages over the course of years. Some of them easy, some of them tough, but most of them usually tend to become cumbersome and complex once you start to use them. So with all my years of wisdom and my narrow minded ness, I chalked it up this one to a another one of those languages too.

Then I downloaded the development tool and installed it, the installation was smooth, as the download was only a few MB can’t be that difficult.

I opened the app, I liked the splash screen, it was as simple as it can be, came up this initial screen

Not many button /icons, Icon’s were Kid friendly and had clear wording below to show what those button would do. I was hoping for tool Tips, leave alone kid friendly tool tips, did not see that.

I might be mistaken, but I think they have used the new Microsoft’s Ribbon control for the Icons, I wish they had used a different color for the ribbon then the rest of the app.

May be a usability expert was not consulted, may be they did, but I would have marked those buttons differently.

I started to type some words on the text editor section, and I was surprised to see a modified version of the same kind of Intelli sensing that I have with my development tools.

All in all my few minutes was enough to make me think that may be there was enough here to make my kids excited about computer programming.

I called my son and my daughter to take a look at it. There is a word Help document included with the install. This kinda of tutorial or Help is not all that good, but it was better than nothing.

The document was very simple. It was a very good primer to start working with Simple Basic. My kids and I were able to start programming soon. We were on our way to start my son’s Hello world program.

More than them I was more excited that my Kid was programming and writing his firs hello world program.

To my surprise it took us less than 10 minutes to put it together. Once we wrote the program and saved it, we were able to run it and get his expected results.

What surprised me more was, my son was able to grasp some of the concepts of programming fairly quickly . I was expecting to teach him to to type, how to save or even what does saving mean. I was going to teach him what the output window was, or what a window was. However, he seems to get most of those concepts quickly so did my daughter. That’s when I struck me that they type their names a lot in video games , they save their files in a Wii consoles, they open saved files from PS2 Memory cards. They know what an output window was, cuz they see popup windows when they play games on the computer.

Well, once we go the basic of saving, opening, and running programs was learnt, we started to move on to other concepts in programming like declaring variables and expressions for calculations.

Pretty soon we were doing stuff that I only learnt later in my learing programming experience. It was fun time with my kids and I felt proud of my kids. Since I was a computer programmer myself and I taught my kids how to program, it was like teaching my trade to my kids like how it was done for ages with Masons or butchers or black smiths etc.

Since that day, I have never had a chance to sit with my kids to do that again, its been a busy fe weeks since then. But my kids have been asking me to work with them to do it. I am thinking about installing this software on their laptop for them to play with. I think that if I do that without proper guidance they might get side tracked and might get frustrated with programming and might not continue to do it or even find an aversion to it.

I certainly plan on working with my kids again and expose them to the joys of programming. Who knows they might do something extraordinary with it.

One of my goals in this process is to document most of my work with them and post them as an informal tutorials so more kids or parents can use them.

Well, wish me luck and patience while I teach my kids how to program using Simple Basic. Visit back for more tutorials and information on this.

10 things that will speed up visual stuido 2008.

Here are the few things I did to speed up my Visual Studio 2008.

1. Turn off splash screen.

I edited my visual studio shortcut to include the /nosplash option in the target filed. Now the value is ,

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /nosplash

This change cuts down the start up time to less than 2 seconds.

2. Turned off Environment tools animation.

Within VS 2008 options dialog, select the "Environment/General" subsection, uncheck the option which reads "Animate environment Tools".

3. Turned off Active item tracking.

Again, within VS 2k8 options dialog, select the "Projects & Solutions" note in the tree view. The second check box from top is "Track Active Item in Solution Explorer" uncheck this. This will stop the

4. All my internal windows are set to "Auto Hide".

None of my windows, like the property, solution, Team Explorer or other windows you might use with you development is pinned by default, this allows VS to start up quicker and allows you to select what ever operation you'ld like to do instead of waiting for VS to be responsive.

5. Turning off the start page

At start up I would like to see a blank IDE, instead of the distracting "Home" page, it aint my home or my googe reader page. If you would like to see that everytime you want to start to do some development go ahead configure it to your"home" page, but I chose the "Show empty ennvironemnt" option. This is available under Options dialog> Environment > startup sub section.

6. Turned off the Auto Tracing of editing in Text editors within VS.

This is available under "Options dialog"> Text Editor> "settings" group panel > uncheck Track Changes.

7. Disable or delete all break points before starting to debug.

Before starting to debug, delete all break points and set only the few break points to test your scenario. This greatly helps in speeding up your debug process, this enables VS to track debug symbols which are currently of interest rather than every other one you might have used during testing othe scenarios.

8."Start pages in Source view".

Unless you are starting to put your screen together, when composing your HTML / aspx pages, start in the source view rather than the design view. Depending on your computer performace, this has always helped me switch pages quickly rather than waiting for design time rendering of controls, even if we don't intend ot change 98% of the content.

9. Build and run options

If you are anyway close to my style of development, you would be debugging your app like a 100 times before you get it right, what is annoying is that, when I start a debug and if my build fails , VS 2008 still askes me if I would like to continue, I "hate" that prompt. There may be reasons why you would like to continue with a debug if you know of a blatant bug in your code? Anyway, under "Options dialog " > projects & solutions > Build and run > the drop down box for "On run when build or deployment error occurs", select "Do not launch".

There is a check box in that screen for "only build startup projects and dependancies on Run" check this box. This will not compile/build projects in your solutions that are not needed for your current debug session.

In the drop down which says " MSBuild project build output verbosity" select "Quite" this will show if there are any errors but will not output any values in to the "Output window".

10. This is more of style and practices which I follow, I have found this to be useful for me.

a. Close all windows, and open only windows that you are currently working on, every 2 or 3 hours I check if I have too many windows open.

b. Learn your keyboard short cuts for most used operations like

F12 to view a method defenition.

Shift+ F6 for building the current project,

and there are bunch of these keyboard short cuts that really helps, this speeds up the VS cuz then VS does not have to show the appropriate popup menu based on which window you are working on.

c. Install Resharper, Power commands and any other utility which you might find useful.

d. If possible get a faster harddisk than the standart one you the Manufacturer offers, that is sure to give you a boost during compilation.

Well, let me know if you have any questions or other suggestions, would love to hear from you.

Happy programming .

-Yogesh

My Visual Studio settings file.

Hi all, I was playing around with my VS settings for font and colors to see if changing some settings would help reduce eye stress and give me different view to work with. Well with all my creative abilities I've put together a color scheme and font selection. Here is how it looks.

Send me an email if you want the .vssettings file.

Happy Monday and happy programming!

-Yogesh

Just completed Survey of Tools of the Trade - Choice Awards from ASP NET Pro magazine

I just took the Annual Readers Choice Awards hosted by ASP Net Pro magazine.

http://www.aspnetpro.com/awards/default.asp

This survey lets us rank the best products we use in various categories.

I believe this helps .NET Developer community in utilizing the best products/tools, there by improving the quality and availability of better tools for future use.

Took me less than 10 minutes.

Have a nice day.

'Class not Registered' with IIS 5.1 on XP.

I am currently working in a project in which we are creating WCF services hosted on IIS. I was provided with a laptop with XP pro SP3 on it. I wish it was loaded with Vista Business/Home or windows Server 2008. Well, if all my wishes came true, sigh!

After installing all the necessary software, I wrote my sample WCF to make sure it is working as desired only to see a HTTP 500 error. Internal server error.

To debug it, I tried several trouble shooting steps like

1. did a cmd > iisreset
2. Rebooted my computer
3. Checked Authentication for the application I am running.
4. Checked security permissions for the wwwroot folder as well as application security.
4.5 Reinstalled IIS too.
5. Checked my event logs to see if there is anything reported ..

thats when I noticed this error.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 36
Description:The server failed to load application '/LM/W3SVC'.
The error was 'The specified metadata was not found.'.

For additional information specific to this message please visit the Microsoft Online Support site located at: http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

and sometimes I got this description too


The server failed to load application '/LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT'. The error was 'Class not registered'.

Here are the steps I took to sove the issue after searching the internet for a day and trying differnt things to sove this.

Solution:
1. Open Component Services from your Adminstrative Tools section.
2. Drill down up to 'My computer' > COM+ applications.
3. If you recived an error at this point, saying
Error Code 8004E00F COM + was unable to talk to Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator.
check your MSDTC and see if it is running.
If MSDTC is not running then start it and try to navigate to the COM+ applications again. If it is still broke try the follow support resolution step. I did it.

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=301919

After I did it, in my case, I could not find Distributed transaction service in my Services list to start. So I had to reinstall it.

To reinstall MSDTC, I did this,
a) within you CMD window set your current path to 'C:\windows\System32' and
run MSDTC -install
Once this is completed you should be able to see the Distributed transaction Coordinator service within your services list.
b) Start it.

Now back to solving the main issue.

4. Now from a command window, set your path to 'C:\windows\system32\inetsrv' folder.

5. Execute the command 'rundll32 wamreg.dll, CreateIISPackage' (case sensitive)

6. Execute the command 'regsvr32 asptxn.dll', should receive an success message box.

7. Execute 'iisreset'

5. Restart the PC.

Once restarted, using your IIS admin MMC window, drill down up to the default website node, right click and choose 'Browse'

IIS should be working as expected.