http://nerddinner.com/blogs/chicago/archive/2004/12/26/390.aspx

If you’re not too busy celebrating the holidays, Rob Caron has just informed us that the December CTP release of Team System is available for download on MSDN. Rob also providesus an installation guidefor the December release. As if the holiday season wasn’t chaotic enough….

Happy Holidays!

Podcast Alleyis featuring an interview with Engadget podcasters Phil Torrone and Lenn Pryor (yes, that Lenn Pryor of Channel9 fame). There’s a video of Phil giving a tour of his (I’m assuming) house and his plethora of geek gadgets. You’ll see things like the “Internet connected coffee maker” and the “iPod Egg chair“. Even his dog who walks around wearing a webcam!

What I want to know is what is his electric bill? How many blown fuses has he had over the years? More importantly, can anyone out in the blogosphere come close to Phil’s set up or better yet, pass him up in “Ultimate Geekdom and toy collection“? If you have something above and beyond what Phil has…let’s see it.

After my success of getting all of the Team System components installed, the true test came when I actually tried to create my first portfolio project. Now if you know my luck you can surely guess this didn’t go right the first time – and you would be correct.
Let me set the stage for you…
In the installation roadmap for Team System, you are to create a user for the TS application pool called ‘TFSIdentity’. From there you must give TFSIdentity god-like access to everything (Admin on the App. Server, Admin on the DB Server, Admin within the ADAM instance, etc.). I also created a user id (let’s call him ‘dbost’) to simulate my project admin/user. Following the installation roadmap, I added ‘dbost’ to the Site Administrators group in Sharepoint services as well as the VSTEAMSCC Administrators group.
On my client machine I logged in as ‘dbost’ and proceeded to launch Visual Studio and connect to my Team System server. No problems. When I created my first portfolio project everything seemed to be cranking away until I received this nice error message “… project was created successfully, with some errors.”. Now isn’t that an interesting message. When I opened the log file the first thing I noticed was that quite a few steps are executed during the project creation process, and sure enough, one of them failed:
—begin Exception entry—
Time: 12/13/2004 10:18:54.420
Event Description: Task “WssPortal” failed.
Exception Type: System.Net.WebException
Exception Message: The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.
…
(view full log file here)
Typical security issue, no problem. I retraced my steps in setting up the different tiers and everything seemed to check out. In desperation, I sent an email to Rob Caron who had me check a number of things, including this…
Rob: “And I assume you’re a member of the local Administrators group on the WSS machine?”
Me: “But of course… uhhh… wait … let me verify that…D’oh! No, I’m not.”
Even though I added my user as a site administrator, I also needed to add them to the Administrators group on the Team System App Server. Being a little green in SharePoint, I’m not sure if this is a SharePoint requirement or an App Server requirement. Nor do I know if this will be required moving forward. I sure hope not. I can’t see making Project Administrators (ie. Project Managers) an Administrator of the App Server box as a good thing.
After I fixed that issue, I made an attempt at creating a project again. And once again, I was presented with the message “… project was created successfully, with some errors.” Opening the log file revealed this:
—begin Exception entry—
Time: 12/14/2004 12:42:07.229
Event Description: Task “Currituck” failed.
Exception Type: System.ArgumentException
Exception Message: ProjectName not found
….
(view full log file here)
I had to let Rob go as it was getting late but I was happy to at least get my project site created. With that, I was able to what documents and templates were available based on the methodology selected at project creation. If you’re interested, you can view a screenshot of an MSF Agile project and a MSF Complete Solution project. I’m not quite sure what the ‘Currituck’ piece is and why it can’t find the project name but I’m sure I’ll find out just in time for the next CTP drop of Visual Studio (estimated to be around Dec. 21, by the way… just in time for the holidays) and everything will change. Such is the excitement of researching pre-release software. It keeps you on your toes and I love it.
I would like to extend my thanks to Rob Caron for helping me resolve my Team System issues. It sure is nice to have an employee of Microsoft address your issues in a timely manner. That didn’t use to be the case. Thanks, Rob!
More to come.

Thanks to Richard Hundhausen for pointing this out to me…

Announcing the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
September 13 – 16, 2005
Pre-conferences September 11 and 12
Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA

According to Richard and his “little (MSFT) birdie”, the dates are shaky. But according to the Los Angeles Convetion Center’s website, they have Sept. 7 – 17th blocked off for MSFT. Could this possibly be the release datefor Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005??? Does Septemeber still constitute “Summer 2005”??? Start making your travel arrangements!!!