October 17, 2008 / No Comment

Recently I had the pleasure of migrating several VSS databases to Team Foundation Server 2008.  One of the databases was pretty large (90k+ files) and took between 12 – 16 hours to migrate.  However, about 6 hours in to the migration, I kept running across an error that would halt the migration process.

The error:
Could not find file ‘C:\Conv\Tfs\<TeamProjectName>\blah\blah\somefile.txt’.

After searching and searching for a solution, I finally ran across this forum post that got me back on track again.  While I cannot take credit for the solution, I would like to add some additional information.

Essentially, Visual Studio [...]

STSADM — Access Denied

November 27, 2007 / 2 Comments

While attempting to deploy some SharePoint code via MSBuild, I ran in to the following problem.

I have a msbuild.proj that executes several stsadm commands. These work perfectly when executed from the command-line. However, once they are called from TeamBuild, I get “Access Denied” on the stsadm execution.

The TFS Service account is a member of the Administrators group on the build server. I can login to the build server as the TFS Service account and execute the command-line successfully. This problem only exists when the commands are spawned from TeamBuild.

I have also tried running several EXEC tasks [...]

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid… Me!

November 14, 2007 / No Comment

I hate to admit that I have been plagued by this stupid BizTalk error for weeks now.  I must say that I haven’t been focusing on this particular issue the entire time, but when I did it wasn’t pretty.  I was never able to wrap my head around the problem, and even worse, the solution.  Until…

The error:
MyOrchestration.odx(783,59): error CS1026: ) expected
MyOrchestration.odx(782,10): error CS1518: Expected class, delegate, enum, interface, or struct

I would receive this error only when a particular orchestration was included in my project.  However, the orchestration that reports the error is not the one causing the error, but the [...]

Something brewing… Not ready for Prime Time.

September 13, 2007 / No Comment

It’s been quiet on the blogging front for awhile.  Things have been pretty quiet at work and nothing of great value has been discovered.  I have been playing with WPF and WCF a bit.  I hooked up BTS 2006 to a WCF Send Port which was pretty cool.  I didn’t think the transport properties form was very “friendly”.  There were several values that were provided as drop-downs, but the drop-down boxes were empty.  I had to go to the BTSNTSVC.exe.config file to determine the proper values.  Once I got beyond that, I was rockin’ and rollin’.  I’m thinking of setting [...]

BizTalk SMTP Adapter is Missing BCC Functionality

August 7, 2007 / No Comment

Ok, so this probably comes to no surprise to many of you.  I remember running in to this problem when I was using BTS 2004.  However, I thought that the community’s cries would be answered with BTS 2006.  I have not had a need for it until now, so I never checked, but again the ability to BCC using the SMTP Adapter does not exist.  Fortunately, there are many ways to skin this cat.  The first 2 that come to mind are:

Don’t forget [...]
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PGP Pipeline Component v1.1

August 7, 2007 / 9 Comments

I ran across a few things that I needed to update and have posted them here as well.

Notable changes include:

Minor code changes that don’t necessarily affect logic, but may [...]
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FTP, PGP, and Me

August 7, 2007 / No Comment

So let me break this down for you…

Company A (Acme, Inc) wants to exchange data with Company C (Charlie Company).  However, I represent Company B (BizTalk United) and we want to collect some of the data as well.  A requirement has been made that all data will be transmitted using FTP and will also be encrypted.  So, as the broker of the integration, I must resolve how to get data from point A to C and still be able to read the data myself.

The solution:

Company A will encrypt their file using the public key from Company B and transmit the [...]
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PGP Pipeline Component

August 7, 2007 / 27 Comments

Recently I was required to perform some PGP encryption and decryption of files.  Realizing this was going to require a custom Pipeline Component, off I went to Google to find one.  Hey, why reinvent the wheel.

I’m not certain why Microsoft didn’t put one in place with the release of BTS 2006, but who am I to judge.

The ones that kept popping up:

And a few others that wanted you to buy it.  Sorry, but I’m [...]
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Search and Replace Pipeline Component

August 7, 2007 / 1 Comment

Ok. So this isn’t the fanciest of things, but it really saved my bacon.

Problem: I have a predefined flat file schema to transform a fixed-length positional file. However, for some unknown reason, random records in the file extend beyond extend beyond the specified record length. I was able to deduce that those records consistently contained a certain value instead of what was expected. They should have been passing a series of zeroes, but instead converted them to decimals. Instead of 00000000 I was getting 00000000.00000000. I tried a few other solutions, but wound up with the need for a custom [...]

BizTalk – fatal error X1001: unknown system exception

August 7, 2007 / 1 Comment

The other day I ran across a very puzzling error: fatal error X1001: unknown system exception

Fortunately, the error message was so descriptive; I was able to resolve my problem right away.

Ok, so I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what I had done wrong that would produce such a nasty error. Upon closing Visual Studio and re-opening the solution, I still received the same error message. Google and newsgroups proved to be of little help – a rare occurrence for me. Unfortunately, “unknown system exception” could stand for a variety of problems. However, I did stumble across one [...]