Local folder already mapped in workspace

I’ve got a small server at home where I also run TFS on for my personal projects and for playing around with it to try some stuff.

Since TFS 2010 Beta 2 is available I wanted to work with VS2010 and TFS 2010. As I’m just a geek who wants to play around with it at home, I didn’t plan how to do this change etc. Because I didn’t care much about the history in source control, I decided to simply reinstall my server (I was already planning to do this as I wanted to use SQL Server 2008).

All went pretty well when installing and configuring. But then yesterday I wanted to add all the source I had on my local machine to the source control. And then the probleem started.
I got the message stating that I already had a workspace mapping for the local directory. WOOPS…. And I couldn’t connect to my old TFS server anymore because I destroyed that completely .
So I hadn’t got a clue what to do, because for as far as I know, the workspace mappings were registered at the server, not locally. I already removed the source control bindings from the solution, but that was not enough. Still getting the error.
It took me quite some time to find that the workspace mappings are also cached on your local machine. I finally found the mapping mentioned in the folder C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0\Cache\versioncontrol.config. I deleted it from there and I could finally add my source to source control again.

Lesson learned: Think twice before doing a format on my server and try to do some planning / impact analysis before throwing things away, even when I do it on my ‘playing around environment’.

Edit: this is the location on a Windows XP machine: C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0\Cache

Experiences with creating a Service Oriented Architecture

In May 2007 (yes a long time ago already ) I started working for the customer I’m still working for. One of my collegues, Dennis Doomen, started here 2 months earlier with setting up a full SOA architecture for .Net as a POC. I joined him for supporting the internal employees by learning .Net (all previous Oracle developers) and also as a developer. When the project was in the acceptance phase, I became the Team leader when Dennis started working on a new project (for the same customer) and now I’m currently holding the position of architect for the systems build in .Net and the newly created front-end applications based upon the architecture.

In the past, the development for this company was fully based upon Oracle & Oracle Forms. They made a (small) shift by introducing a .Net web application for the external customers, which we have build. The new system was still largely Oracle (as database, but also Oracle Forms for the application for the internal users and unfortunately a lot of business logic). During the this period, TFS was introduced, which is now also being used for bug registration / tracking. Next to those initial application, more web applications have been created using .Net.

We created a Service Oriented Architecture based upon the following technologies: Web Service Software Factory (using WCF) for our backend logic, Web Client Software Factory for our front-end application(s), Enterprise Library Logging Application Block, Unity and the Enterprise Library Policy Injection as some of the base components. Next to that we also used open source components, like RhinoMocks and Nhibernate.

In the last 2 years we have run into issues, especially just after Go Live, and also during the development period. Looking back now, we made some good choices, but also some that are not so good. I’m going to try to post about some of the good choices (in my opinion) and about the bad choices and how we have fixed them or how we are planning to fix them. Hope I can help other people not to make the same less good choices and help them make better choices.