Telerik has just released two TFS tools : TFS Work item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard.  And the best part is : They are FREE.  yes you read it correctly FREE.  Inf act Telerik released them, but it is Imaginet Resources who build tehm.

The tools are fully build using Telerik's RadControls for WPF, which should give a great user experience, and it is.

The version now released is still in beta, so you still could encounter a few bugs.  But they have a great forum, and looking through the forum posts they do a great job with replying to the problems.

I already did a quick test and it looks good.  Going to deep dive in it the next couple of days/weeks.  Especially I want to see if it's better than the Episerver dashboard we are using for the moment.  Also I will hceck it against the Conchango Dashboard, because the version we have in our company of teh Conchango Dashboard is very slow (They have a newer version so i will check that also).

Just encountered 2 problems for the moment:

1. Starting up the taskboard from within the Work Item Manager works, but not the taskboard settings sometimes gives an error on opening.
2. Didn't manage to startup the project dashboard.  It gives me a black screen.

Find all info here : http://www.telerik.com/products/tfsmanager-and-tfsdashboard.aspx

A screenshot

Roy Osherove has blogged an interesting article on his Team Leadership blog Five Whys.  In this article he talks about how many time a team lead should be with his team to be an effective teamlead for his team.

So if you're a teamlead reaad this article : http://5whys.com/blog/spend-at-least-50-of-your-time-with-your-team.html

Yesterday, on 2 PC's the installation of SQL Server 2005 failed.  The first PC failed with the installation of MSXML6 and on SQL Server VSS Writer.  the second PC failed on SQL Server VSS Writer.  We couldn't find out why, even with the install log.

To solve this we put on the extended log on MSI's.  This is a logging for each step of the MSI and results in a big log file.  It's called voicewarmup. So just set it on before the installation and after the installation, set it back off.  You will find the log file in the TEMP folder under the name msiNNNNN.log.  Now you can walk through this log file and find the solution.

Find more info here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa369776(VS.85).aspx and here http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/1127/

yesterday evening, we upgraded our TFS Server with the Conchango Scrum template 2.2.  For testing we created a testproject.  Afterwards when we want to delete the project we got following error:

TF30063: You are not authorized to access <tfsserver>

As I'm in the TFS Admin group I thought this would be no problem.  But it is.  And the problem is at the level of the Sharepoint Project Portal.  I was not defined in site collection administration.  It seems that the Farm admins supports AD groups, while the Site collection administrators doesn't.

So the solution is easy.

1. Go to the team project portal
2. Click on site actions and choose Site settings
3. Click on Site collection administrators
4. Add your account

Now, you can delete your project.

If you want to know more, read more on this technet article.

At least one time a year, Visug announces an international speaker.  This time they got Brad Abrams, program Manager @ Microsoft and author of Framework Design Guidelines.

Brad will talk about these guidelines.  Just a must-attend session.

More info and register for this FREE event : http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/16/Default.aspx

Since yesterday (August 6th, 2009) 6PM GMT/10 AM , Windows 7 RTM is available for MSDN and Technet subscribers.

First I thought I wait till today because of the slow performance while everyone is downloading, but just couldn't wait and tried the download.  I took less than 1 hour to download Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit .  So I got no really download performance problem .

You can download it here :

• MSDN : http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-be/subscriptions/default.aspx
• Technet : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx

Last week, Microsoft released Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3.  Now, the Expression Blend users can integrate their work in TFS Version Control.

Read everything in this post of Ed Hintz: http://blogs.msdn.com/edhintz/archive/2009/07/13/tfs-integration-a-top-10-new-feature-of-expression-blend-3.aspx.

As you will read in the post, TFS2008 can also be used, buyt you need to install a patch.

We had some problems.  It seems that nobody knows what the data-tier server for TFS was.  Well it's easy to find out.

Go the your TFS application server and start Explorer.  Browse to "X:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services" where X is your installation HD.  Hier you find the web.config.

Open the web.config and you will see your connectionstring to the TFS instance of your data-tier.