Unable to open TFS Build Process Templates in Visual Studio 2012

Hi guys,

Yet another development issue and solution

Issue:

After installing Visual Studio 2012 , I was not able to open the build process templates on my environment. Strange this was - they were getting opened correctly in other environments or on other machines.

What was the error - 

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.WorkflowExtensions, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
File name: 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.WorkflowExtensions, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'

What was the issue and solution?

Well, not quite sure about the exact issue but only solution which I could find to resolve this error is to install the workflow manager on your environment.
Here is how you can do it

Launch you command prompt (as administrator) and run this command

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer>WebpiCmd.exe /Install /Products:WorkflowManagerTools /AcceptEula

After doing this I was able to open build process templates on my environment.
Hope this helps you.

Reference - Here

Error Solved : http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name was not present on the provided ClaimsIdentity.

While working with MVC application , I came across an interesting thing and got something to learn from it so thought to share.

Scenario :

Typically when you implement any MVC web application , you want to implement some security features in it and hence use of anti-forgery token is one of the approach I was trying to implement in one of my MVC web application.

How it works?

Internally how it works is , in traditional web application which are not claims aware – it simply uses User.Identity.Name as anti-forgery token to validate form submitted.  

But when we try the same with claims aware applications– it throws an error. 

Why? 

Because now it tries to use the claims of type NameIdentifier and IdentityProvider (by default).

Error:

‘http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name' was not present on the provided ClaimsIdentity.

Solution:

Either your claims provider should send you the claims of type NameIdentifier as well as IdentityProvider , but in my case I was not having both claims with me.

So I had to use the following workaround to resolve this issue -

Add the following line in the App_Start method of the application.

AntiForgeryConfig.UniqueClaimTypeIdentifier = "http://your-sts.net/user/EmailAddress";

As the name suggest - it makes application aware that the unique claim type provider is EmailAddress and not the default one.

After this change , you can see the __RequestVerificationToken on the details page source information.

Conclusion:

This Error can be solved by letting application know that which is the claim type you want to use as unique identifier. In my case I am using EmailAddress because I had this type of claim available with me so you can also use any other claim type which your sts is providing you.

TFS Build Error Solved: Set-AzureDeployment : Unable to write data to the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

Hi guys,

Recently I faced a strange issue and figured out a solution as well so thought to share it because I didn't find much over the web about it.

We have created the TFS Build System built for on premise TFS server. We are using it for continuous deployment on Windows Azure Cloud Services and everything is working fine. There is an excellent documentation available here on MSDN so you can take a look at it.

What was the error?
The issue came in when build stopped working , prior builds were successful but we started facing issue with each new build.

Error Message was - Set-AzureDeployment : Unable to write data to the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.

Actually in the background - build process has a workflow and it tries to execute an PowerShell command on build server for deployment of your cloud services in Windows Azure.

What is the solution?
The way build process workflow works is - it needs the .publishsetting file for doing deployments on your Azure Cloud Services.
All you need to do is , download the .publishsetting file for your Azure subscription (you can click here) and save it locally. Now go to the build server and replace your old .publishsetting file with this new one.
Now try queuing your builds - everything should work fine (If It would have worked before :) ).

If you are not using the build system but only using the PowerShell command i.e. Set-AzureDeployment to do the deployment then also you can opt the same solution , i.e. just download and replace your old .publishsetting file with new one.

Another solution
Now , even though the solution mentioned above worked for me fine - but I faced similar issue on another environment few days after I written this post and above solution didn't work so had to search for solution again and found a workaround.
So thought to edit the blog post and document this workaround so that it helps someone.

The changes needs to be done in the script - what this changes is - try to upload the cspkg file to blob storage and the create / updnate the deployment using blob url.

You can define the new variable $containerName at top of your file and initialize with some string value which will act as container name.

# If the target container does not already exist, create it. 
$containerState = Get-AzureStorageContainer -Name $containerName -ea 0
if ($containerState -eq $null)
{
    New-AzureStorageContainer -Name $containerName | out-null
}

Set-AzureStorageBlobContent -File $packageLocation -Container $containerName -Blob $blob -Force| Out-Null

$script:packageLocation = (Get-AzureStorageBlob -blob $blobName -Container $containerName).ICloudBlob.uri.AbsoluteUri

Hope this helps someone.

Passing String Collection or Array from Controller to View Script in MVC 4

Hi Guys,

This is going to be a short post but thought to just keep this for the record, as I had to search on this for some time.

Scenario:
All I was trying to do was to initialize collection of strings in the controller and wanted to pass this collection to the view.
View was having the JavaScript function which required to have this collection in the form of array.

After searching around this I found a solution which is a single liner :).

Here is my controller where I have simply initialized the string collection and passing through the ViewBag on the view

Controller:

public ActionResult Index()

{

   List<string> entites = new List<string>();

   entites.Add("User 1");

   entites.Add("User 2");

   entites.Add("User 3");

   entites.Add("User 4");

   ViewBag.Users = entites;

   return View();

}

View / JavaScript:

<script>

    $(document).ready(function ()

    {

        var usersArray = @Html.Raw(Json.Encode(ViewBag.Users))

           

        //Some Code..

    });

</script>

Output:

var usersArray = ["User 1","User 2","User 3","User 4"]

Hope this helps someone.

Error Solved : The specified module Azure was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory

I was trying to configure the TFS build for continuous deployment on Azure Cloud Services by following the steps mentioned in the documentation http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/continuous-delivery/

After configuring everything, when I queued my build - I got this error message - The specified module Azure was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory

As soon as I looked this error I knew that this was coming from the PowerShell file named as - PublishCloudService.ps1 which you can get from the link mentioned above.
After quick search - I got a link which actually resolved the issue.

What was the issue?

The build was trying to launch the process on build server - PowerShell.exe but somehow system was not able to find the AzurePowerShell module path.

Solution:

Open your PowerShell Script file and find the command Import-Module Azure and add the following line just above it
$env:PSModulePath=$env:PSModulePath+";"+"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell"

After this modification , save the file and try to queue the build again.

I hope this helps someone. 

Error creating the Web Proxy specified in the 'system.net/defaultProxy' configuration section - Azure Emulator

All right, again a quick post on a strange error I saw in Azure Emulator.

We had our ASP.NET MVC Site up and running when we used to run it in standalone mode.

So for Diagnostic purpose , we used Azure Diagnostic features and configured our web role with the settings which were needed to be done as described in article Here. and right after that we started facing the issue in our application which said

Error creating the Web Proxy specified in the 'system.net/defaultProxy' configuration section

After a long chase, reading few hundred posts on internet there was nothing logical which I could figure unless I came across this similar post.

Solution:

Open Web.config file of your application and check the trace listener's tag , In my case that was missing the filter type attribute.
So the correct tag should be like

<listeners>

 <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=1.8.0.0,

Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics">

   <filter type=""/>

 </add>

</listeners>

Hope this helps someone.

Server Error 500 Solved : Azure Emulator and ASP.NET MVC

Hi Guys,

A quick post on how we solved the strange issue in Azure Emulator.
We had our ASP.NET MVC site up and running , but when we used to run it in the Azure Emulator - we used to get an error with code 500.

After long research and reading various posts on it , nothing helpful was found.

What was the reason behind this error?

There is a class file named WebRole.cs for any web role project in Azure. This class is inherited from another class known as RoleEntryPoint.
So the WebRole.cs usually contains override of a method known as OnStart().
There are few more methods you can override in this class like OnStop() and OnRun()

In our case the OnRun() method was having empty implementation and was missing base.Run() statement which was causing the problem.

After adding simply one statement i.e. base.Run() in the OnRun() method everything started working fine.

Hope this helps someone.