We have moved

Our new home is xrm2011.wordpress.com. See you there!

CRM 4.0 Administration Console up for grabs (free)

I've taken the time to clean up some code I wrote around security roles and views administration and I've packaged it nicely in a redistributable that I published on CodePlex.

So now it's out there, have a look: http://www.codeplex.com/CRM40Admin.

CRM 4.0: Workflow error on wait condition for custom activity

Symptoms

• You wrote a custom Workflow Activity
• You created a Workflow that contains your custom activity and a wait condition
• You deployed and published the workflow and it "kind of" works, but when you try to open a running workflow you get the generic "An error has occurred. Try this action again." message.
• You enable tracing and see that there are some exceptions that vaguely mention serialization.

Probable Cause

• You have properties in your Workflow Activity class and the Workflow Process doesn't know how to serialize them. This seems to be a problem for all properties that are not persisted using the Dependency Property mechanism.

Solution

• Remove the properties, unregister and re-register the assembly and off you go.

Tera? No, Peta.

All right, so we all know that Vista contains some bugs, but I love this one. I was trying to unzip an archive of about 5 GB into an external USB drive. As you see, my drive had more than 44GB free, but Vista didn't let me unzip the archive (which would have amounted to 8GB uncompressed) because my external disk happened to have less than 6PB free. Can't wait for the first 10PB drive. I then used WinZip and everything worked.

BizTalk Fails Configuring the Group

If the message looks like this:

[WARN] AdminLib GetBTSMessage: hrErr=80070002; Msg=The system cannot find the file specified.;

Then most probably DTC is not configured/not running (you beast!). Look here for a step-by-step solution.

Customize Navigation

Use this .xsd file to verify schema of customizations, ISV and Site Map .xml files.

Restore Team Foundation Server (TFS 2005) Database

Have you noticed the disparity about backup procedures documentation and how much information one can find about restoring from those backups?

What I am going to provide here is not new information: I just hope that this post will come up in some searches, therefore sparing some frustration.

Recently we had a bad day with our TFS database server, we decided to cut or losses and restore to the previous day's backups. Little we knew...

You will find comprehensive instructions on how to restore (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252458.aspx or http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsue/articles/511396.aspx), you will diligently perform all the steps, fire up the servers, connect using Visual Studio and everything will seem to work properly. Until a week later when all of a sudden you will open a project you didn't touch for a while and when checking out an aspx page you'll see that it contains XML code. Or you'll find C# code belonging to another project into a DataSet XSD.

What happened? This happened: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=251122&SiteID=1.

Yes, there is a cache in the TFS Application server, and restoring the databases without manually deleting the cache ("%Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\VersionControl\Data") leads to bad, bad things.