Network share feeds in WAC

You know about (and actively using) the Windows Admin Center (WAC), right?! 😉

While it’s great for managing your Microsoft infrastructure, it can also be extended with different extensions. You can even write and use your internal, custom extensions, which do… well, whatever you make them do. And you can read all about that here.

But let’s go back to the subject of today’s post – extensions can be installed via different feeds, either official or unofficial, provided by Microsoft or 3rd-party. You can easily add new feeds or remove existent by providing the feed location, which can be either a NuGet feed URL or a file share location, as stated in the official docs.

Using a file share location is easy:

  • you choose/create a folder:

  • share it (\\<my_server_name>\WACExtensions in my case):

  • and add it to your feeds – I’ll use the “PowerShell way”:

But no!

My feed seems to be added successfully, but it’s not showing in the list!

You can try the same through the web interface – it’s almost the same (OK, you’ll get the errors):

And permissions are fine, don’t worry. 😉

Why’s that?!

The catch here is that we added an empty folder/share – when adding this share, WAC intelligently looked into the folder, found nothing and (successfully) didn’t add our share to the feed list, as it’s empty. And yes, it also forgot to mention it when using PowerShell.

So, what can be done?

The workaround/solution is rather simple – just make sure you don’t add an empty feed/folder.

Just for fun – I’ve downloaded the HPE Extension for WAC, moved it into the WACExtensions shared folder and tried to add the feed again:

And – it worked! 😊

Cheers!

Latest “Patch Tuesday” – errors installing update

Latest “Patch Tuesday” (May 13th, 2014) has brought us a pack of updates (you can read all the details about them here and here), but one of them was making trouble for me. The update I’m talking about is called “Security Update for Windows Server 2012 R2 (KB2920189)”. You can read more about this update in KB2920189.

I’ve tried to install it on a number of my Hyper-V virtual machines (Generation 2), but the update keeps failing with error 800F0922:

image

ISSUE:
This error and its cause is described in
KB2962824. In short, this update expects that the BitLocker feature is installed (not enabled or used, but installed) – in my case, the problem was Secure Boot, which is enabled by default on Generation 2 virtual machines.

RESOLUTION/WORKAROUND:
You can install the BitLocker feature on your Windows Server 2012 R2 servers before installing this update, or you can switch the Secure Boot off, install the update and switch it back on (I’ve decided to do the latter).

After switching the Secure Boot off, installing the update and switching it on again, the update installed successfully:

image

Have fun!

TFS 2010 – item locked…

First of all, just a little disclaimer – I’m NOT a TFS specialist (neither a developer); I’m only a user that wants to help you save the time troubleshooting some errors that I encountered along the way (I’m also not responsible if the following deletes your data, crashes your computer or worse). 🙂

Today I had some troubles with my TFS 2010 installation. For some reason, it was giving me error saying “The item [full_path] is locked for check-out by [user_name] in workspace [workspace_name].“. Error looks something like this:

tfs_error_1

Ok, so my file is locked by some other user – first approach would be to ask that other user to “unlock” it for me. In my case, this method was not successful. This other user said to me that he’s also having the same problem just with another user’s locked file…

If you have the same problem, and want to resolve this as quickly as possible (Is this the best method? Probably not; I don’t know, but this helped me (see the disclaimer on top of the post)), maybe this workaround will help you as well:

W: If you know your way around command prompt, you can use the tf.exe utility (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z51z7zy0(v=VS.100).aspx) that is available if you installed Visual Studio. As the documentation says, you can find this utility in the following location “<drive>:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 10.0Common7IDE”. The full command that I used is: tf workspace /delete [user_workspace];[domain][user_name] /s:http://[tfs_server_name]:8080 (i.e. tf workspace /delete TOMICA-PC;HOMEtomica /s:http://localhost:8080/tfs).

I hope that someone finds this information useful, and I’m looking forward to get some comments from people that are more experienced in this matter…