CRM 2011 Outlook Client - Stuck in reboot loop installing SQL Express

Ran into this issue today when trying to install the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for Microsoft Office Outlook where the installer would constantly ask for a reboot when trying to install “Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition 2008 (CRM)”. No matter how many times you rebooted it would always ask to reboot again. Note: This only happens if you use the “Offline” functionality.

The solution to this is to manually install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express and call the instance “CRM”. This allows CRM to continue and skip over the installation of SQL Server Express.

Hope this helps others who get stuck with the install.

Use a custom TFS Work Item Query to keep track of what you’ve worked on today

At SSW we need to record timesheets for all the work that we do. Normally keeping track of what you’ve worked on is difficult and you end up writing “Worked on web stuff”

If you use TFS you can easily keep track of the Work Items that you’ve completed today

You can then just copy and paste the results into your timesheets

Trimming down the size of your Outlook OST

Recently my Outlook 2010 OST grew to over 4GB of space which made Outlook slow.

One of the biggest reasons why it’s this large is SSW’s policy against auto-archiving and never permanently deleting anything. As a result my Deleted Items folder was actually 2.1 GB!

Now, I don’t actually need all of those items as they do span back about 4 years. So the goal is to only bring down the current year’s deleted items.

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Adding configurable parameters to a Custom TFS 2010 Build Template & Remote Compiling Source Code on Unix

I’m currently working at a client that requires some source code to compile in Unix - as their major systems are Unix based with new development being done in .NET. The great thing about the project is that they have are trying to consolidate everything into TFS as the single source of truth (it’s mostly there).

To get the unix stuff going I’ve customized the DefaultTemplate.xaml and added an extra InvokeProcess that calls a PowerShell script to copy files to Unix using Pscp (for secure remote copy), compile code using Plink (allows remote command execution over SSH) and finally copy the Unix binaries back to the build server.

The PowerShell script takes in a number of arguments like remote server details, remote paths, usernames etc. So obviously we don’t want these being set via the arguments property for the InvokeProcess activity because:

• Need to check out and modify the build template and checkin
• The build workflow isn’t exactly the nicest thing to modify 
• Can’t reuse the template for other environments (UAT and Production)
• Can’t quickly make changes and queue a new build

What you should do instead is to define new Arguments for your template.

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Customizing Work Items in TFS 2010

The Team Foundation Server Power Tools allow you to edit templates online or offline. In the online mode, changes you make are instantly visible when you save the changes so be careful. I would advise creating a dummy Team Project to do the customizations on first before rolling the changes out to actual Team Projects. The offline mode works by saving the work item definitions locally as XML and making changes to the XML file. You will need to import the XML to the Team Project to deploy the changes.

So let’s take a look at adding a the following fields to Product Backlog Item WIT of the Scrum 1.0 template:

• Deployed in Version
• Actual Hours
• Estimated Hours

Note: I know Actual/Estimates aren’t part of Scrum, but the higher-ups like to track it. It’s “Scrum-But” :)

1. Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Types | Open WIT From Server

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