Thursday, May 26, 2016

Troubleshooting the dreaded "The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required." error message in Microsoft Test Manager

Our company is starting to use the Microsoft Test Manager a lot more to manage our testing, both manual and automated. Additionally, we've recently started on creating some new Test Controllers and Test Agents with an exotic network configuration. On one of these new Test Controllers, I've started creating Lab test runs, and been getting the error message "The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required." When you Google this error message, you get what's described in this post on MSDN. In my case, this was the former problem: the account under which the test controller was running couldn't see the build folder.

After reading that last statement, you might say "well, why didn't you check to make sure that the drop folder was in the place it should have been ?". And, I did. Sort of. Due to our network configuration and aliases, my user could see it on the expected place at the alias in my portion of the network, but the user under which the Test Controller was running (not the tests themselves as configured in the Microsoft Test Manager, but instead the Test Controller software, they're not the same user) couldn't because we have some synchronization going on. Once I logged on to the machine on which the Test Controller service was running ** AS THE USER UNDER WHICH THE TEST CONTROLLER WAS RUNNING ** and went to the network alias myself, I could finally see that the synchronization between the locations on the network that had the same alias wasn't running and the build that I expected to be there was in fact not running.

Problem solved.

Monday, May 02, 2016

Migrating code in TFS from one Team Project to another Team Project within the same Team Project Collection

My company has frequently had the issue of moving code around within the same Team Project Collection as shifting desires and motivations for the organization of our code have swayed our company. Previously, we've used tools such as the TFS Integration Platform available on code plex. That project has its share of issues, namely that:
a) It was half baked to begin with
b) It's no longer maintained and doesn't work for versions later than TFS 2012.

Fortunately for me, thanks to a fortuitous Stack Overflow post, I've found the following script to recursively move the content of one folder to another folder, and it even works across Team Projects within the same collection (but not across Team Project Collections):

Param(
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()][string] $SourceFolder,
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()][string] $TargetFolder
)

Get-TfsChildItem $SourceFolder |
    select -Skip 1 |  # skip the root dir
    foreach {
        & "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" rename $_.serveritem $_.serveritem.replace($SourceFolder, $TargetFolder)
    }

In order to run the script above, you'll need both Visual Studio and TFS Power Tools installed. When you install the Power Tools, you'll need to ensure that the PowerShell module is selected in the installation options. Also, because the path to the Power Tools PowerShell module isn't put in the PSModulesPath by default, you'll have to manually import the module into your PowerShell settings like so (before you run the script):

Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2013 Power Tools\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerTools.PowerShell.dll"