Install Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 For Eclipse

Typically shops using Eclipse will probably be using SVN or some other source control system, but there are cases where you shop may be a mix of coding languages.  Team Foundation Server is a good offering for source control and much more, such as bug tracking, project management, etc.  If you are in such a shop, Teamprise, which is now owned by Microsoft, wrote a plugin for Eclipse that will connect to Team Foundation Server.  I will describe how to install this plugin for Eclipse in the below steps.  I’m basing my example off the Ganymede installation of Eclipse.

1.  Download TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0.zip.  Unpack zip file into C:\Tools. You should have C:\Tools\TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0.

2.  In Eclipse, open the menu Help ^ Software Updates… On other flavors of Eclipse this maybe Help ^ Install New Software.

3.  In the Available Software tab, click the button “Add Site…”. In the “Add Site” dialog, click the “Local…” button, which will bring up a folder dialog. See the screen below. Select the folder C:\Tools\TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0 which is what was unpacked earlier. Click Ok in folder dialog, then click Ok in “Add Site” dialog.

4.   Now you should see the plugin available in your “Available Software”. Check the Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 checkbox and click the “Install…” button. It will chug through some requirements calculations for a second or two.

5.  After it’s done checking dependencies, an Install dialog will appear as shown below. Click Next button, accept the license agreement, and then click Finish button. After it’s done it will suggest that you restart eclipse, so do that now.

 

In upcoming blogs I will be talking about the usage of this plugin with respect to TFS.

SSRS Will Not Let You Upload RDLs of Certain Sizes

Not sure exactly how we ran into this, but for some reason one of our 2008 Reporting Services servers would only allow us to upload RDLs that were less than ~105k.  Couldn’t find much online so we ended up calling Microsoft to figure out what the deal was.  Turns out here is a registry key that needs to be in place to remedy this situation.

Location: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters

Add a REG_DWORD with the name MaxRequestBytes and a hex value of 500000.  You will be able to upload larger RDLs now.

VS2010 And SSRS Report Viewer Hanging

The other day I needed to integrated Reporting Services reports with a web application.  I knew I wanted to use the ReportViewer control, but I ran into a few issues of which I’ll state here.  Briefly, one issue is that the web application was already an ASP.NET MVC application, so I wanted to see if I could get the control to work with a view.  I tried to wrap the control in a <form runat=server>, because it needs viewstate, etc  Some ASP.NET controls will work just fine in MVC, no biggy, but this one is a no go.  So I was left with using webforms, not the ideal, but that’s what I had to work with.  So the big issue I ran into was that the ReportViewer control would hang and never load a report.  It turns out that they made some fixes to the async rendering behavior.  To avoid having the report hang you need to set report properties on the initial page post only, as shown below.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (!IsPostBack)
    {
        rptViewer.ServerReport.ReportPath = "/MyReportFolder/My Report";
        rptViewer.ServerReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://SomeRptServerName/ReportServer/");
    }
}

Using VS2008 VS2005 with TFS 2010 Compatibility

The other day I was trying to setup a TFS 2010 server to demo it’s usage.  Since most of the developers using are VS2010, I didn’t have any issues showing them how to connect. But when it came to some designers that needed BIDS (VS2008) for creating reports for Reporting Services, I ran into some bizarre issues.  One of the main issues is that TFS 2010 uses project collections, which is new, and older clients need some backwards compatibility fixes.

Problem: Older versions of Visual Studio will not connect to TFS 2010.  You might get authentication or server unavailable errors.

Solution:  Install the backwards compatibility patches for you version of Visual Studio.  Below shows the steps to take to get your version of VS connected

1.  Install Visual Studio service pack:

VS2008 SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en

VS2005 SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&displaylang=en

2.  Install Team Explorer if you need it:

VS2008: http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=0ED12659-3D41-4420-BBB0-A46E51BFCA86&displaylang=en

VS2005: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=46473C2A-BB85-4461-BB27-4792A5DEF222&amp;displaylang=ja&displaylang=en

3.  Install VS forward compatibility for TFS:

VS2008: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d&displaylang=en

VS2005: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689&displaylang=en

4.  Since TFS 2010 has introduced the concept of project collections connecting to TFS by adding a server to the Team Explorer will not work like it used to.  You have to modify the registry and insert the connection to the server with this type of format:  http://{TFS Server}:8080/tfs/{CollectionName} (some of the default here are port and tfs server root folder name).  The reason you can just add this as a new server is that the server path does not allow the “/” character.

VS2008: Enter a new string value at this key location “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers”.  The key name can be the name of you tfs project collection if you want.  The key I added for my project demo was http://d01teamweb/tfs/DefaultCollection with a key name DefaultCollection.

VS2005: Enter a new string value at this key location “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation\Servers”.  The key name can be the name of you tfs project collection if you want.  The key I added for my project demo was http://d01teamweb/tfs/DefaultCollection with a key name DefaultCollection.

You’ll need to reopen any existing VS instances that need to pick up this information.  Once you open VS and go to the Team Explorer window, you should see the project collection you added to the registry.  Since 2005/2008 don’t handle project collection, they can only work with one at a time.