Fun with VS2008SP1 and VPC
So I'm preparing for my presentation at the Upcoming Codeapalooza event: which will be Saturday September 6 at 2:30 PM in Wheaton (like how I got a little plug in on this blog post?). This will be a "hands-on" presentation so I have a separate Virtual PC representing the Client workstation from my TFS Virtual Server. Naturally I want to demo with the latest and greatest, so I upgraded my TFS Virtual Server (installed on Windows Server 2003) and the Client (Windows Vista Business) both with their corresponding Service Pack installs.
I had zero issues with the TFS server, both the Visual Studio SP (since I have Team System Web Access installed I have to have Team Explorer installed). But I'm chugging along on the client and decide to add some stuff to source code. Since I'm used to SP1 features (man, it doesn't take very long does it?) I try to drag a folder from Windows Explorer to Source Code Explorer in Team Explorer (I think I just lost a few IQ points typing that..) But nothing happened!
Hmm, something clearly isn't right. I discover, somehow, the SP1 installer, which reported no errors, didn't upgrade the Team Explorer component. Well at first I figure I can (unhappily) live without those features, until I get a Work-Item customized. Then, every time I tried to open the Work Item forms from Team Explorer I get a "Could not load type 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.WorkItemTypeDeniedOrNotExistException' from assembly 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client" exception. When I first saw that I thought I might have made a mistake with the customization, so I open the item up in TSWA and no error. Same with Team Explorer run directly on the TFS server.
The funny thing, everything works fine on the client, I just constantly got that error (and I mean constantly, every time I opened a Work Item, ran a query, or whatever). The "annoyance factor" overrode the "nothing is broke but the error message so I can live with it" factor (especially given that I am planning on demoing with the VPC and would look pretty shabby with a "Yeah, I get this error all the time, just ignore it" in my presentation.
So I decide I had to fix it. Not much info out there on google beyond what I already knew (you get this when SP1 isn't installed). So next I tried to re-install SP1, but no dice. For some reason the installer for SP1 just didn't recognize that I had Team Explorer installed, so it didn't update it.
So my only recourse was to uninstall Visual Studio 2008 and reinstall the application and the Service pack. The interesting thing, when I did reinstall VSTS 2008, (from the Team Suite Edition I got from a MSDN subscription, which I have a copy of thanks to my former colleague and Team System MVP Steve St. Jean). Before I installed SP1, I decided to run Visual Studio 2008. And the curious thing, this time Team Explorer didn't get included automatically. I had to do a separate install. I'm not sure why - but it likely had something to do with the previous issues.
I then proceeded to install SP1 and this time, Team Explorer got updated properly as expected. The downside, on a Virtual Machine, even on a host with a decent processor (Intel Q6600) and 4GB of memory, it took a significant amount of time.
Perhaps there were other work-arounds that would have been accomplished faster, but I do think a straight uninstall/reinstall is "cleanest".