While studying for my TFS 2010 certificate I came across this awesome codeplex page where you can download and share process templates. If you want to see which other templates are available besides the ones installed with TFS 2010. Or you’re more the ‘do-it-yourself’ kinda guy and you want to share your own awesome creations with the rest of the world. This: http://templex.codeplex.com/ is the place to be.
Cheers
F.
Yesterday I wanted to install the following patch for TFS 2010. I went through the kb article, made sure all the prerequisites were met and did a little search for known issues which ended up empty. In the believe it was save, I went ahead with installing the patch on our application tier. The wizard came up, I went through the screens, the patch started installing and 10 minutes later I received a message claiming that the install was succesful. Great I thought … but then I opened team foundation administration console and I saw the following error appear on my screen.
There went my smiling face. Nothing worked anymore, TFS was dead.
Fast forwarding 24 hours (during those 24 hours: I tried to find the cause myself without any luck, my hair went from brown to gray, I considered a couple of times to throw my pc out of the window and I contacted Microsoft to escalate the problem and provided them with log information and such) … News came from Microsoft that they where able to identify the cause of the problem and had a solution. Finally some good news.
The problem seemed to be that the patch tried to update the tfs_Configuration database but that it was unable to do so because that database was being mirrored. This caused TFS never to recover from servicing mode making it useless. unfortunately the installation wizard completed with success. First thing going through my mind was …
The solution was simple.
- Remove the mirroring from the database.
- Shut down any running TFS processes and then wait for 16 minutes or more (it seems somebody at Microsoft timed this).
- Install the patch again.
30 minutes later it was like nothing ever happened. And there was yet again a smile on my face.
Tip of the day:
Always make sure, before installing a patch for TFS, none of the affected databases is being backed up nor mirrored.
