SQL Server Collation and Team Foundation

I'm not a guru when it comes to SQL Server Collation settings. I live in the Netherlands so there is no way i will ever need to sort on double width Japanese unicode characters. So when i need to set the collation of a team foundation server installation i do what the installation guide tells me......

Or do I?

So i read the following text in the guide about the collation setting:

The default choice is based on the setting for non-Unicode language in Windows Server 2003. The default for most languages is a Windows collation, however, for U.S. English, SQL Server 2005 installs with a SQL Server collation for backwards-compatibility. If you want to change the collation from the default to get support for additional U.S. English characters, consider Latin1_General.

Now naturaly, wanting the best for my team foundation installation, i want support for adition U.S. English characters. Because i don't need backwards compatibility.

Or do I?

Now after i worked through all the steps of the installation guide. Its time to install Team Foundation. I start the installation, and come to the system health check part. And it says I have a wrong collation setting.....

Lesson learned:

Leave the SQL Server Collation option default, even if the installation guide says you could choose another one.

Hack your Team Foundation database

I stumbled onto this post by Marcel de Vries:

http://blogs.infosupport.com/marcelv/archive/2006/03/16/4483.aspx

In one of my previous blogs i told you that i had to manually edit some stuff in de database as well (not the WIT database, but the Version Control database). I might not have mentioned the dangers of this in that previous post though.

By some strange leap of faith though, I did actually make a back-up before attempting to hack the database. I guess you think of those things when you have 40 hours of work in a shelve set yourself that you don't want to do again.

It's one of those days again!

Do you ever get that. When you are at work you can't wait to get back home and do stuff you want to do. Then when you actually get home, the thing you wanted to do seemed too boring, and now you actually want to get back to work again?

It has been one of those days for me. So what do you do when you are at home bored? Here is what I do:

- Empty your browser's address bar, then hit one random letter on your keyboard and see if there is an interesting website in your history (if none, try a different letter).

- Go to the MSDN Forums and refresh the "My Threads" section about 50 times to see if that brilliant answer you had for some question has finally been read by the person who posted the question.

- Write useless blog entries about what you do when you are bored.

Sharepoint headaches

I'm still fairly new to the administration of our Sharepoint Portal Server. But then we changed our domain name, and we came in the position where we had to get our sites back with only a SQL Back-up.

I got the dreaded "The database schema is too old to perform this operation" error message.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;888839

It took me a while to figure out that the article seems somewhat incomplete. Not only does the Sharepoint Portal Server SP need to be the exact same as the version
as the one you were using when you made the back-up. Also the Sharepoint Services version needs to be the exact same.

Took me some time to figure that one out.

Team Foundation migration without preparation

We are still using the Beta 3 refresh, so there might have been some changes in the final product, but here is a short guide of how to fix the problems you might be having if you migrated Team Foundation to another domain without reading up on it or doing any preparation first.

- Problem one, TFS services won't start.

Make new TFS Service, Admin and Reporting accounts in the new domain. Assign them the same rights as the old ones. Also switch start identity of the services to those accounts. Don't forget the SQL Server rights on the databases.

- Problem two, users can't logon to the server.

Redo all the security and grouping stuff on all your Team Projects from the TFS Admin account. We actually had a problem that one project got bugged and to give people access again we needed to make them Team Foundation Admin. Still trying to find a solution for that one. The rest of the projects did work like a charm though.

- Problem three, Part I, users lost their workspaces and more importantly their shelvesets.

First off, start Visual Studio and open the Team Explorer on all the developer workstations. TFS will now make new users in the system with their own id's, and their own workspace (because the domain name is different then before and the usernames are stored in the format DOMAIN\Username).

Next you go to the SQL Server to the TfsVersionControl database, the open the Workspaces table, and you will see the old and new workspaces. Now do some good gueswork and deductive reasoning on what the old id for a particular user is, and what the new one is. Then delete the newly created namespace and switch the user id's of the old namespaces around with the new user id's. Et voilá, part one of the problem solved.

- Problem three, part II, the old workspace and location are still cached on the developers computer, and therefor you can't assign the same directory binding in the new workspace (it will report it is already in use by another workspace).

Go to: C:\Documents and Settings\[Username].[DOMAIN]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\1.0\Cache, edit the VersionControl.config file containing the workspace information. Most of the XML tags are self explanatory, just edit the ownerName attribute of the WorkspaceInfo tag. Switch all the old domains with the new domain and you are finished.

Moving your office's serverfarm.

What do you get when you have 2 sys admins, 19 servers, 32 workstations, and 4 days to move it all to a new location and get it up and running again?

A headache probably.

Now add the bonus of figuring it would be nice to redo your active directory structure and reinstall your fileserver, exchange server AND SQL servers?

Thats right, you get a chaotic 4 days, without too much sleep.

I still can't believe we actually did it though. Ok, we had moral support from the girls in human resources and administration who were doing the decorating and planning of all the other stuff that needed to be moved. And ofcourse my boss, the head of development was kind enough to do some workstation testing.

At the end of the four days there were a couple of things not up and running:

Team Foundation Server
Sharepoint Portal Server
WSUS Server

I can tell you now, don't try to move your Team Foundation Server to another domain without knowing the concequences. I found out the hard way though.

Hope I get more out of this blog this time....

This is the second time I try to do the whole blogging stuff. I made a blog last year but, because of a serious World of Warcraft addiction, i didn't get around to writing any posts. So after a month or two I decided to delete the blog.

After that, some porn site thought it was fun to register the same name (and the abandoned blog names of many others) and put some links to porn on there. I had a laugh about it, but i still wanted to warn anyone that might read this about the phenomenon.

I just quit the game I was so addicted to, and decided to pick up blogging again. I feel that there is a lot I can write about that could benefit others. I am a software developer and system administrator for a small consultancy firm based in The Netherlands. My main areas of expertise are the C# and the .NET framework, especially the remoting, reflection and codedom namespaces. I am also the SQL Server and Exchange administrator at my company, I do some of the normal sysadmin stuff as well though.