Troubleshooting a full transaction log.

While trying to create a new TFS project, I was running into issues creating the SharePoint site. I noticed that the SQL Server log had the following message

"The transaction log for the database 'WSS_Content' is full. To find out why the space in the log cannot be reused, see the log_reuse_wait_desc column in sys.databases".

So I ran the following query

select [name], [log_reuse_wait], [log_reuse_wait_desc] from sys.databases

and noticed that log_reuse_wait_desc had the value set to LOG_BACKUP.

This meant that a Log backup operation is preventing the truncation of log files and consequently its reuse. So I explicitly performed a Transaction Log backup through Management studio. With that the error message disappeared and the transaction log file became reusable.

Ref:
Troubleshooting a Full Transaction Log (Error 9002)

How to: Back Up a Transaction Log (SQL Server Management Studio)

Controlling form layout for TFS Work Items

Here is a very good post on the following undocumented attributes in TFS for controlling work item form layouts
1. Name
2. MinimumSize
3. NumberFormat
4. MaxLength
5. Format

TFS Backup: Remember the Agent

I scheduled a maintenance job to backup the TFS databases following the steps published on msdn. When I executed the plan, I noticed the following error in the SQL Server logs.

BackupDiskFile::CreateMedia: Backup device 'D:\Backups\WSS_Content_backup_200801111921.bak' failed to create. Operating system error 5(Access is denied.)

After some investigation, I noticed that the account under which SQL Server Agent was running did not have write permissions on the backup folder. After granting the appropriate permissions and re-executing the plan, backups got created and I heaved a sigh of relief!

The crawler could not communicate with the server

Recently, I saw the following error message logged by Office SharePoint Server Search service.
"The crawler could not communicate with the server"

The Search service had been working perfecly just a few days back. So this error, out of the blue, did surprise me. A bit of calm investigation revealed that the password associated with the service account had expired. Changing the password and restarting the service fixed this issue!

'Exec' task needs a command to execute.

After editing the post-build event of my project in VS 2005, the following error came up
"'Exec' task needs a command to execute". I realized that I had a new-line character still present in the post-build event. After clearing that I rebuilt the project successfully.

Deleting build history in TFS

If we delete the builds from Build Explorer, the same is not reflected in the drop down list of of the Bug work item. Benjamin shows us how to delete build history from TFS in this article.