First problem: During the rebuild phase, the TFS is recreating the analysis database from scratch and then it rebuilds it. Unfortunately during the recreation, one of the xml files of the OLAP cube was generated completely empty. This caused the processing to stop. To figure this one out you have to look into the event log on the TFS server. The fix was a little bit radical. The first attempt to just delete the offending file did not succeed and thus we created a new analysis database (like here)

Second problem:
We waited for the TFSJobAgent to do its job and finish synchronizing the databases. That did not go right unfortunately. After waiting and waiting, we got lots of errors saying
"[Common Structures Warehouse Sync]: ---> TF221033: Job failed to acquire a lock using lock mode Shared, resource DataSync: [...].[TFS_Warehouse] and timeout 30".

This sounded kinda’ logic since we were dealing with around 150gb of TFS related databases and we had 5 project collections and jobs were fighting over getting the exclusive locks. I looked into this and tried to find a solution but … no. Microsoft was not playing nice. There are no tools available to investigate and control this kind of issues. I knew there were some services offered by TFS we could use to get a grasp on the situation. The service that was interesting to us is located in a location similar to this:
http://tfsinstance:8080/teamfoundation/administration/v3.0/warehousecontrolservice.asmx.

But good luck working with that. Beside needing to be logged on the TFS machine, one needs to know the name of the services you want to interrogate and interact with it. The sollution? Yeap; WCF and WPF.
I made a simple application which consumes the above said service.



Ok, that’s just a tool. What is the solution? The solution is to stop all jobs and then start them one by one, such that they are not fighting over exclusive locks . Using the above little program we just clicked stop on each job and then enabled them one by one.

The end result is a fully formed and uptodate TFS_Warehouse database (and of course all the reports running on it).

P.S. I will come back with the source/binary … it’s just too dirty to be put in public

[Update] Here is the link to the source code. Just make sure you are updating the service refference to the correct tfs instance.

# argument assignment
$newVirtualDirectory = $args[0]
$physicalPath = $args[1]

import-module webadministration

$virtualDir = 'IIS:\Sites\Default Web Site\'+$newVirtualDirectory
New-Item $virtualDir -type Application -physicalPath $physicalPath
Set-ItemProperty $virtualDir -name EnabledProtocols -Value "http,net.tcp"
Set-ItemProperty $virtualDir -name applicationPool -value "ASP.NET v4.0"

This virtual machine is configured with:
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Beta
Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Team Foundation Server Beta
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
Microsoft Project 2010
Microsoft Office Professional 2010 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

So you can just dive into TFS11 and VS11 without having to go though all the install and configuration hassles.

Thanks Brian and TFS team for the help

Just download this http://powerguivsx.codeplex.com/ and restart VS. You should now be able to edit ps1 files with syntax highlight and some code completion

One thing I saw so far is that it takes about 10 sec to start when opening a script file.

Now robocopy is replacing xcopy in my book and to make robocopy play nice, I add ^& exit 0 at the end. Like this:


robocopy \\networkdrive destpath *.* ^& exit 0


Still I got it fixed. Just two steps:
- set the management studio to run in XP SP3 compatibility mode
- if you have the UAC turned off, turn it on on the first level (raise the level from the bottom one notch)

Now it’s working like a charm.

where workitemid is the id given to the workitem by TFS

You can also see the documentation here