Dependency Walker & SP1 TFS 2008 Upgrade Issues

My plan today was to upgrade Team Foundation Server 2008 to Service Pack 1 (SP1) today. My client runs a dual server implementation and we run Team Explorer on the App Tier of this set up. Therefore we needed to upgrade Team Explorer and TFS itself to SP1 for 2008.

 

Round 1

The TFS SP1 Documentation states the following –

“…you should first install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and then install SP1 for Team Foundation Server on any server that is running both Team Foundation Server and Team Explorer. If you try to update Team Foundation Server first, the update will fail. If you update Team Foundation Server but not Team Explorer, you will encounter errors if you try to use that installation of Team Explorer to perform certain administrative tasks on Team Foundation Server. ”

Makes sense. Install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and then move to SP1 for TFS. So we did…

Upon installing SP1 for Visual Studio we had to reboot (for whatever reason) … upon reboot services failed to start and we were notified. Upon further investigation in the event viewer we found the following entries:

“The configuration data for this product is corrupt.”

and

“TF30059: Fatal error while initializing web service …”

and

“TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension: …”

Plus, inside of the event viewer I was seeing that TFS was “Crashing” and a crash report was being generated for Microsoft. I did some searching and found this blog entry (thanks Tom) and noticed that he was having a very similar problem. The blog recommended that we install SP1 for TFS as this was the hot-fix as listed here by Microsoft. Apparently there is a problem with SP1 Explorer components and NON-SP1 TFS components.

No problem, right? Lets install SP1 for Team Foundation Server 2008. Nah, nope, didnt work: FATAL ERROR. Again, baffled, back to the drawing board.

 

Round 2

Upon further looking into the service errors it was brought to my attention that the IIS Admin service was NOT starting. Running “iisreset” from the command line didn’t do anything either (other than giving me a FAIL finger). It would fail stating that one of the dependencies wasn’t starting up. I looked up the dependencies and noticed this:

I also noticed that the service Dependency Replicator was failing as well. Ok, so this makes sense… if Depdendency replicator failes, then everything else fails in the dependency tree. I had installed this service to help with some continuous integration stuff I’m doing for the client.

 

The Solution…

I removed this service (completely uninstalled it). Then tried to start IIS. It worked. Cool.

We then tried to start the TFS Services. Nope. Failure still. But now, the symptoms were EXACTLY the same as noted this blog entry.

We then kicked off the TFS 2008 SP1 installation and then tried to start the TFS Services again. SUCCESS!

I then re-installed Dependency Resolver and everything started working as normal. No errors.

 

Root Cause

In the TFS installation guide the following is noted:

“… If you update Team Foundation Server but not Team Explorer, you will encounter errors if you try to use that installation of Team Explorer to perform certain administrative tasks on Team Foundation Server… “

Essentially the guide is stating “if you update one, but not the other, then it won’t work”. This is exactly what happened. I haven’t tapped into the TFS Dependency Replicator Code base that much but I assume that it uses some components that are shared between Explorer and TFS. When this mis-match occurred it broke.

 

RE-Cap – Events & HOW TO FIX

1. Installed VS 2008 SP1 to update Team Explorer
2. Tried to install TFS 2008 SP1 to update TFS
3. Fatal Error Occurred.
4. Traced back the dependencies to Dependency Replicator was blocking the web publishing (seen above)
5. Stop and Uninstall Dependency Replicator
6. Install TFS 2008 SP1
7. Restart
8. Re-Install Dependency Replicator
9. Done