The Althoff Chronicles

Building and deploying a web service or website via TFS is pretty straight forward, but automatically deploying a windows service or console application takes a b it of setup. I’ve outlined the steps below to get your service deployed. Step 1: Set up Automated Build and MSDeploy on the Target server. If you are doing any sort of automated build/deploy I recommend using MSDeploy. You can follow steps 1-3 from a previous post here . Step 2: Edit the .csproj file The project file for the app you are trying to deploy needs to be edited so that TFS will create a directory for the output of the project. Otherwise the project will be built, but the assemblies will be placed in the code drop location with no organization to it. To edit the file, go to the open file dialog and locate the csproj file. Select it but don’t click “Open. Instead click on the dropdown arrow next to the Open button, select “Open with”, and choose the XML (Text) editor as shown: Once the file is open, add the fo...

We’ve all been there before. We set up our new web or application server with the latest code, update the connection strings with the proper SQL Server instance and password and fire up the application only to see all sorts of SQL connection/login issues.  These issues can be very frustrating to troubleshoot because you are not sure if the Login is incorrect, the db is spelled incorrectly or if there are network issues preventing you from seeing the SQL Server. On windows machines, there is a simple way to validate that the SQL server is accessible from the server. Remote desktop into the server having connection issues Click on “Start” and search for Folder Options. Click on Folder options, go to the View tab and validate that the “Hide extensions for known file types” is unchecked:   Go to the desktop, right click and select New –> Text Document Rename the file connection.udl and accept the rename warning Double click on the udl file and it will open the Data Li...

We recently migrated a production environment for a client to new Servers. I had previously been using MSDeploy to deploy the websites/services to the servers so I figured all I had to do was install MSDeploy, point Update my deploy scripts to point to the new servers, and deploy! I was using MSDeploy 2 on the previous servers so I figured it would work on the new ones. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be that easy. When I ran the updated scripts I got the following error: Fatal: Request to remote agent URL ' http://myserver/MSDEPLOYAGENTSERVICE ' failed. Fatal: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized. Fatal count: 1 I was using an admin account and I could hit that URL above in a browser so I knew it wasn’t an authorization issue. Here are the things I tried that DIDN’T work: Uninstall/Reinstall MSDeploy 2 Install MSDeploy 3 Create the fake user group on the server per these instructions: http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/troubleshooting-web-dep...

  Recently, We had a website that didn’t have frequent visitors, but when the visitors did come, the website would take a long time to load up the first time. This is expected behavior because IIS shuts down its worker threads. 1 approach would be to set the IdleTimeout to 0 which means the threads are never aborted (details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771956(v=ws.10).aspx ). Instead of that though I decided to try my hand at PowerShell and came up with the following script: 1: # List of URLS to Ping 2: $urls = @( "Http://URL1.com" , "https://URL2.com" ) 3:   4: #Ping all URLs in the list 5: foreach ($objItem in $urls) { 6: $req=[system.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($objItem); 7: $res = $req.getresponse(); 8: $stat = $res.statuscode; 9: $res.Close(); 10: 11: #Pump it out to a text file 12: $res | Out-File pingresults.txt -append 13: } After that I set up a simple ...

  Ever want to add a control to the design surface, but you have so many controls that you have a difficult time finding them? I was shown this neat shortcut that has saved me a lot of time over the past few days. Click on the toolbox or use the Hotkey Alt+Ctrl+x Start typing the name of the control. The control will be highlighted If you have multiple controls that match the text, hit Tab to go to the next one. Simple and easy!

At my company we are in the process of migrating to a new TFS environment. As part of that we wanted to do some house cleaning and only migrate the projects that have been used recently. We’ve got a lot of clients, each with their own project that have been created over the past 3 years. We wanted an easy way to see what the latest activity was on the project. That will give us a good view into what projects can be archived and which ones need to be moved. I could have just gone to Source Control and did a “view history” for each project, but that would have taken a long time (and be very tedious). Instead I wrote a simple console app that digs into each project collection and project and exports some simple project/Check-in data to a CSV file. I can then open up the CSV in Excel and add other info like “Code Status”, and “Migration Status” easily. Here is the code I used. This is a pretty basic example and TFS provides a lot more, but it did what I needed it to. As I always say, Ke...

  When I first started deploying code from TFS I took the simple approach and created a batch file and deployed the websites via RoboCopy. I’m a very “Keep it simple” kind of guy, so this worked for us for a long time and so nothing was changed. With my most recent project however, we were deploying code over a slow VPN tunnel from our servers in Chicago to servers located in Europe. Due to this, the RoboCopy was taking over 4.5 hours to complete. I needed a better/faster way so I started looking into Web Deploy (MSDeploy). I was able to get it working fairly easily and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get it working, and how much time its saved me! I can now deploy the code in less than 20 minutes! I’ve outlined the process in detail below, but in general you only need to do this: Add MSBuild parameters to your automated build Customize the deployment parameters for the website Create a batch file to an auto-generated MSDeploy script Execute the batch file fro...