WebDeployproblem – error message not obvious

We have been using WebDeploy along with Beta 2 of TFS for some while. We have a local IIS installed on the WebServer and the build is taking the settings from this IIS when preparing the deploy package.

Last week we installed the RC of Visual Studio and TFS. Instead of upgrading the Build server we installed a new one. Besides from the problem with Build Defintions that I blogged about we had one peculiar problem. We got an error when building that said:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets (1650): The “MapUriToIisWebServer” task failed unexpectedly.
When making a search on “MapUriToIisWebServer” I found one (!) reference – how often does that happen! It referenced to the Connect site and a bug report. This told me a workaround would be to uncheck “Apply server settings to all users” on the Web tab of the Project Properties. I made this change and now it worked. Satisfied with solving that I went on with next thing without giving much thought to this…

However, things started to become strange to another user, that settings were not preserved and so on. So we started looking at this a bit more and realized what the checkbox actually did, when uncechking some settings were removed from the project file and ended up in a personal setting instead – not what we wanted.

So we started digging into this. A local build in VS worked. So to track down the error I went to the build server trying to do the same build. And this is when things started to show up. Loading the web project that contained the webdeployment did not work. An error message similar to this appeared:

The components it complained about was the IIS 6 Management Compability and some more stuff related to IIS 6. So I ended up looking at Vishal Joshis blog post about Basic Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Setup For Visual Studio 2010 and ended up installing some role services. First I tried to add the things he highlights but ended up added everything with Security and everything with IIS 6 as well as the Management Service.  

Now I was certain it would work, but I ended up with another error that is pretty new and unfamiliar to a Windows XP user:

I checked, and the account I was running under was an administrator. Then I realized I was not running the process as administrator. So right-click and say “Run as administrator” made the trick. Now it works.

A long way to a pretty simple error, but the first indication of the error was not that obvious…

Advertisement

User experience with Gated Check-in

When your TFS administrator has enabled the Gated Check-in feature you do not notice anything at first. However, when you check in files a new dialog box appears:

As you can see in the green-marked area the system has created a Shelveset where your changes are stored temporary. The changes are then being built using the build server. If the build is successful the changes are committed, otherwise they are not – which means your changes have not been checked-in.

The red-marked area shows a check-box that makes it possible to choose if your changes should be kept locally or not. Default is that they are preserved (as in the picture). More about this later.

In the Build Explorer a build that is triggered via a Gated Check-in is indicated by an icon showing up next to the build, see this image:

Above the green indicator (that I put there) you can see the icon. In the same place you see the clock icon if it is a scheduled build and so on.

When the build has been finished it either when all green and the check-in has committed, or an unsuccessful build was the result, and then the check-in was Rejected. As a user you notice this as a pop-up dialog is diaplayed. Below you can see the two different dialogs:

In the case where the Check-in has committed you probably want to make sure your workspace looks the same as what has been checked-in. You do this by pressing the Reconcile button. If you checked the “Preserve my pending changes locally” you the tool will sync everything for you. You can find the same functionality in the Build Explorer if you bring up the build log. There you can see if the check-in was Committed or Rejected and you can perform the Reconcilation from there as well.

Some important point to think about:
– Your changes are not Check-in if the build was not successful. A partially successful build is considered unsuccessful.
– If the build works locally, but not at check-in, one thing to look for is project reference problems

This feature will most certainly change the work behavior of the users. Make sure not to get any strange mis-behavior…

Good luck!

Configuring Gated Check-In

You have probably heard of a new feature in Visual Studio/TFS 2010 called Gated Check-In. The problem this is supposed to solve is the problem of broken builds – when a check-in makes the next build fail. In order to start using this feature you configure it in a certain way.

First you create a Build definition pointing out the solution you want to build in your “Gate”. You configure it to trigger at Gated Check-in as below.

Next important step is to chose when this build should trigger. This is configured under the Workspace tab in the Build definition. By pointing out a workspace location, whenever trying to check-in a file to that workspace a new build is triggered. In our current application we have three different solutions and each has its own build associated to it.

The functionality you get will make it impossible to check-in anything whenever this build is unsuccessful. Remember that a partially successful build, for example when some unit tests fail, will be considered an unsuccessful build.

I have also posted about the user experience Gated Check-in, se this post https://tomasscott.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/user-experience-with-gated-check-in/

Default setting might cause problems with TFS2010 Builds

Do you experience problems with your builds in TFS2010?
Unchanged builds that sometimes work and sometimes fail?

You might have problems with build agents. Build agents are used on build servers, and also on target machines to make it all work.
When you start up a new build, default is a build agent called *. So sometimes the build servers agent is used, and sometimes any other agent found on the network.
Of course this behavior is good if you have several identical build servers and want to take the first free one. However, if the other build agent is not a complete build server with Visual Studio installed, the build fails.

Here you can see a certain section of the Build definition with the default value of the build agent, which is the wildcard.

So be sure to point out a build agent that can be used to build your solution. This also makes the naming of you build agents important, so you can use the wild card in a good way. For example, call all build servers something with VSBuild, and you can use *VSBuild* as your build agent – and any free agent matching this name will be used.

In this image you can see that I have specified which build server to use.

Videointervju om Visual Studio 2010

Om ni följt bloggen så vet ni att vi kör ett projekt med Visual Studio och TFS 2010. Nu finns en videointervju med oss publicerad på Channel9, http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/buzzfrog/Lnsfrskringar-en-av-de-frsta-att-kra-Visual-Studio-2010-p-riktigt

På TechDays i Örebro 23-24 mars kommer ni ha möjlighet att höra mer om våra erfarenheter. Har just fått veta att vi blivit antagna som talare! Ytterligare en anledning att åka dit!?