Black's Web

If you have TFS Power Tools installed and Microsoft’s Communicator IM tool installed, you may get this error:  Team Foundation Error, Specified cast is not valid.

To resolve this error, open Visual Studio, in the Team Explorer portion of the IDE, right click on Team Members.  From the popup menu, select Personal Settings.  In the Personal Settings dialog, click on the Change button next to the Collaboration Provider choice.

And choose <None> and click the OK button, so now the Collaboration information looks like this.

Click the OK button on the Personal Settings dialog and exit Visual Studio.

Using your favorite TEXT editor, open your PersonalSettings.config file (C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation Server\PersonalSettings.config) and changed the xml element from

<CollaborationProvider connection="{none}" />

to

<CollaborationProvider connection="" />

and save the file.

Now open Visual Studio and it should launch with no errors.

Tags: tfs, team foundation server, visual studio

Thought I would share some details I recently learned to save others some pain and suffering…

When searching, viewing or getting source Label, know that you will search change labels in our Team Project, not just the labels/change sets for the current project (Trunk/Branch).  Notice below, when searching for a label (after right clicking on the branch and choosing get specific version) you will see all the labels in the Team Project, not just those labels applied to the selected branch (labels circled in red).  This is important to note when getting source from TFS based on a label…  make sure you choose the correct label or you will be getting versions of source you don’t expect.

Change Sets are different though.

Notice the Containing file value and only 3 changes sets exist for this branch.  A Change Set is a grouping of one or more files and the changes that were all committed (checked in) at the same time.

Tags: tfs, team foundation server, lables, change sets, source control

I don’t use Picasa or Picasa Web as often as I used to, but I may start using it more often now.  Recently I found an extension for BlogEngine.Net that enables you to retrieve and display a Picasa Album or Picasa SlideShow.  Once configured, all you have to do is add a unique text string (provided by the Picasa extension admin screen) to your blog post or page and the extension does the rest of the work for you.

This Picasa extension (by RTUR.NET) can be found here.  On his posting you will find a some additional information regarding installation, configuration and usage.

Depending on your hosting environment this Picasa extension may not work, it did not work for me from the start (both on my local PC/Laptop on with my hosting provider. I would get the following error on the page where I expected to see pictures from Picasa.

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object. "

After a few comments back and forth with RTUR and some experimentation on my part, I was able to get it working.  For some reason in my environments environment variables were not being set.  So if the extension does not work “out of the box” for you, please review my code changes below to the Picasa.cs code file.  The code changes are highlighted.

Below is a sample album and slide show.

========================================================================

-  February, 26th 2009

I havent tested it yet, but I wonder if the Extension Manager Bug I mentioned in this post had anything to do with the error I was getting, causing me to add extra code to make sure environment variables get set.

Tags: picasa, pictures, blogengine.net, slide show, extension