As of this morning there were 415 people registered for the Chicago .NET User Group’s “Day of .NET” event! I’m looking forward to presenting some compelling Team System content. Thanks to Ajay Sudan (Product Manger for Visual Studio Team System) for supplying me with some updated (and informative) material!

I hope all goes well. See… my laptop isn’t necessarily powerful enough to run Team Foundation server along with Team System Suite. Therfore, I’m lugging my Dell PowerEdge 600SC development server along with me. It’s running Windows Server 2003 and Virtual Server 2005, along with 2GB of RAM. I have 1GB dedicated on the dev box to the Team Foundation virtual machine and my laptop (with a 1GB of memory itself) will be playing the part of the client. I’m toying with murphy in that I’m only brining the box. No keyboard, no monitor! If the machine doesn’t boot up properly, I won’t have a way to find out what’s going on. I’ve tested it 5 times already without a hitch, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow {fingers-crossed}.

I’ll try to post the goings-on from DoDN-6 tomorrow.

After only getting about 3 hours of sleep last night, my Team System sessions at the Chicago Day of .NET event went off without a hitch. It’s so easy to talk about something for an hour+ when you’re so passionate about it. I want to thank all of you who came up to me and told me how much you enjoyed the presentations – Thank you!

There seemed to be a lot of interest around the policy check-in feature of Team Foundation and something I think I’ll be concentrating on in the near term future. There’s so much to learn and so much more content to deliver. Be on the lookout for more VSTS content coming your way.

For those of you that asked, here are my slides from the sessions:

Introduction to Team System* – DoDN6–VSTSIntro.zip
* I want to thank Richard Hundhausen for his contribution on some of slides.

Visual Studio Designers – I’m not able to publish these slides at this time. Sorry. To not leave you hanging, check out the Drill Down into Visual Studio Team System Architect webcast on MSDN. You can view the webcastand download their slides.

This Saturday, April 30th, the Chicago .NET User Group (CNUG) is presenting another information packed “Day of .NET” event. The “Day of .NET” event is an all-day Saturday event that is free (thanks to sponsors) and open to anyone in the developer community. This is our 6th event and we’re up to 300 registered attendees so far.

This particular event will be covering a wide range of topics – everything from Visual Studio 2005 to WSE to BizTalk and Sharepoint integration. Scheduled to present this plethora of content will be Chris Kinsman, Marc Gusmano, Derek Ferguson, Keith Franklin, Chris Mayo, Mark Melsa, Keenan Newton, Ramprakash Gopinathon and yours truly. I’ll be presenting two topics on Team System: Introduction to Visual Studio Team System and An Overview of Visual Studio Team Architect.

If you’re looking to spend a Saturday with your fellow peers to discuss some of the hot topics in the .NET world, be sure to attend “Day of .NET 6”!

What: Day of .NET 6
When: April 30th, 2005, 8:30AM – 4:30PM
Where: Harper College, 1200 W. Algonquin Road, Palatine, IL. (map)
Register Here

Rob Caron has already touched on this, but I thought I spread the message here as I’m the one who encountered this odd behaviour. Thanks to a three way IM session between myself, Rob, and Eli Robillard, we were able to figure out what was going on.

Essentially, I was going through the steps to install the VSTS Beta 2 bits. I started with my base Windows Server 2003 VPC image, installed ASP.NET, than Active Directory, than SQL 2005 April CTP (SQL install comes before WSS!) than Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). When WSS finished installing, it’s suppose to launch the sharepoint site in a browser. Unfortunately, I received a generic error. You know, the kind you get because . I proceeded to turn CustomErrors off to see the true error message and say this:

Access to the path “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files\_layouts\7908a291\1034c155″ is denied.

Basically what I was able to delineate was the fact that the ASP.NET process couldn’t create my temporary ASP.NET files. I was currently logged in as my machine’s Administrator and looking at the ACLs on the temp files folder, the Administrators group (which Administrator is a member of) had Full Control. Yet, I was still getting an access denied error. I also noticed that there was a listing for the “Autenticated Users” group, but that particular group didn’t have “Write” access. I went ahead and modified the assignment and gave “Authenticated Users” “Write” acces. Switched back to my browser, and it worked. But I wasn’t happy with the solution.

Why did I need to go through this extra step? Why didn’t the WSS installer set up the appropriate rights? To make a long story short and to not bore with the details of the conversation and thoughts going back and forth between me, Rob and Eli, Rob hit on a topic about the ordering of my install. I thought, “maybe something is out of whack with my ordering”. Who’s responsible for creating the temp files folder? ASP.NET install, that’s who. Who’s responsible for all sorts of policies and permissions definitions, Active Directory install, that’s who. Why did I install ASP.NET before I made the machine a domain controller (installing Active Directory)? I wasn’t sure.

So, I flipped back to VPC and basically started all over again with a fresh base image of Windows Server 2003. This time my install pattern followed as such: Active Directory, ASP.NET, WSS, and when the WSS install completed, my browser brought up the WSS site without a hitch. Bingo, problem solved.

When I informed Rob and Eli of my success, Eli was kind enough to point outthis remark in the Windows Sharepoint Services Administration Guide:

Running Windows SharePoint Services on a Domain Controller

So it just goes to show you… RTFM!

After all that… I said my “adieu” to Rob and Eli and continued on with my VSTS install. At this point, I was on the “Install SQL 2005 April CTP” step. I proceeded to install SQL2K5 to be greeted with some strange error at some point in the process that I can’t remember. Another cry for help to Rob, and he proceeds to tell me, “RTFM”. In this case it’s the VSTS install guide, which informs the user to install WSSAFTER SQL2K5. So I flip back to yet another fresh image of Windows Server 2003 and proceed to install: Active Directory, than ASP.NET, than SQL 2K5, than WSS, and all is well – so far.

Rob Caron provides thorough insight into your options (and cost) for purchasing Team System. A must read.