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Today I made what should have been a easy change to some code I was working. I needed to embed a file as a resource in my application, and then at runtime, retrieve that file using reflection. Everything was working fine until I checked my code in and let the Continuous integration process kick in. I ended up with a failed build due to unit tests not passing and a lovely error message:

What is the DimDate table, and why would I want to, or need to populate it in TFS 2010? The DimDate table contains 1 row for every day from the date you installed TFS to 4 months into the future. TFS has a job that runs (Common Structures Warehouse Sync) that updates this table for you. However, if you need to get dates into this table that are more then 4 months into the future, you need to take some extra steps.

In the past 6 months, I’ve run into an error whereby I can not open the Group Policy Object on a local computer. The error is “Failed to open the Group Policy Object on this computer. You may not have appropriate rights.” In the details pain, it reads Unspecified error.

In TFS 2010, one of the key reports is the burn down report. This report shows up on the home page of the project portal (SharePoint) and is also available as a standard report. In reality, it’s actually two separate reports, one is under the Project Management folder, the other in the dashboards folder.

While I usually run as a normal user on Windows and elevate permissions as needed, sometimes this just doesn’t cut it. Today I needed to be able to start and stop a windows service as a normal user running a piece of code (actually it’s a integration test). With UAC enabled, even though I was an administrator, I still couldn’t access the service. After a bit of searching, I came across the following Server Fault question, which had an accepted answer.