Great news!
I'm still alive! Yes, I know you all agree that's great news. At least, I think it's great news so will classify it as such here in my blog.
First, a bit of business:
Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System product team – This Wednesday
Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new in Beta 2.
We will be holding two sessions:
Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones
-or-
Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones
Now for something on a more specific and on-the-front-lines style.
Orcas Beta 2 has been out for awhile now, and with it a lovely improvement that I think will make Team Foundation administrators jump for joy, throwing confetti and streamers all the way. Hey, it's still my blog and I can imagine what I want to.
In Whidbey, syncing users from Active Directory to TFS happened due to three conditions but really only two conditions. This was fixed in Orcas as part of the Sync Large Groups feature crew. As such, you can now take advantage of the ability to modify the periodic AD/GSS sync period. To do so, you need to manually modify a Web.config file on the Application Tier that by deafult will appear under the folder "%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\services". DISCLAIMER: I do not guarrantee that this will not cause your computer to eat all of the data it has ever come into contact with, possible with fire. This confers no warranties and no rights, your mileage may vary, use at your own risk, void where prohibited, etc. [Note: still my blog].
You'll need to add the following two lines to the key/value pair section at the top of this file, followed by resetting IIS to make sure our application pool picks up the changes:
<add key="IdentityUpdatePeriod" value="01:00:00" />
<add key="IdentityUpdateInitial" value="01:00:00" />
Note that I've set both the initial update (i.e. the delay after startup that the first periodic sync happens) and the delay between periodic syncs to 1 hour. You can increase this to multiple hours, or decrease it to a matter of minutes. Be very careful when reducing the time as forcing the sync to happen too frequently will likely decrease the overall performance/throughput of your Team Foundation Server due to the multiple connections to your domain controllers that a sync opens as well as the processing that it kicks off in the SQL Server to update the cache.
Well, there you have it. Administrators spontaneously breaking out in song, bluebirds and rainbows for everyone, and a bright smiling sun grinning at us from behind fluffy white clouds. That last part sounds somehow like Super Mario Brothers, and this frightens me.