Debugging

For the best development experience, use a TFS Virtual Machine with Visual Studio 2017 installed and work directly on the machine.

Do not ever debug on a production server!

Server Plugin #

You can then set the output folder for the project to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 12.0\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins\ or use the deploy.cmd file in Aggregator.ServerPlugin project to refresh Aggregator’s assembly on a target test system. Here is a sample

@echo off
set CONFIGURATION=%1
set TARGETDIR=%2
set PLUGIN_FOLDER=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 14.0\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins

echo Deploy '%CONFIGURATION%' from '%TARGETDIR%' to '%PLUGIN_FOLDER%'

copy /Y "%TARGETDIR%\TFSAggregator2.Core.dll" "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%"
copy /Y "%TARGETDIR%\TFSAggregator2.Core.pdb" "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%"
copy /Y "%TARGETDIR%\TFSAggregator2.ServerPlugin.dll" "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%"
copy /Y "%TARGETDIR%\TFSAggregator2.ServerPlugin.pdb" "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%"
copy /Y "%TARGETDIR%\TFSAggregator2.ServerPlugin.dll.config" "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%"

IF NOT EXIST "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%\TFSAggregator2.ServerPlugin.policies" (
    copy "samples\TFSAggregator2.ServerPlugin.policies" "%PLUGIN_FOLDER%"
)

echo Deploy complete.

Do not commit changes to this file!

To debug attach to the w3wp.exe on the server and set breakpoints as you would normally.

Note. Use 12.0 for TFS 2013, 14.0 for TFS 2015 and 15.0 for TFS 2017.

Remote Debugging #

TFS is not required to successfully build and debug Aggregator. In fact we successfully used Remote Debugging.

See Local build for additional details.

Web Service #

If TFS is running on a different machine, e.g. a VM. you have to permit incoming connections to IIS Express.

Say that the machine running Visual Studio has address 192.168.192.168 and the Aggregator.WebHooks.csproj listen on http://localhost:54145/.

Steps:

  1. Add <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:54145:192.168.192.168" /> below <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:54145:localhost" /> to .vs\config\applicationhost.config
  2. Run netsh http add urlacl url=http://192.168.192.168:54145/ user=everyone from an elevated prompt
  3. netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="IISExpressWeb" dir=in protocol=tcp localport=54145 profile=private remoteip=localsubnet action=allow
  4. Export the TFS SSL certificate
  5. Copy the PFX file on the host machine and import as Trusted root 
 iisexpress.exe Error: 0 : [Critical]    01.410 faf47830-acf6-4fde-b9bf-6c99118f8c1d Exception encountered processing notification: TF400324: Team Foundation services are not available from server https://name-of-tfs-server/DefaultCollection/.
Technical information (for administrator):
  The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.