This past month, i've been working on a project with Team Foundation Server that has to integrate with MS Project Server 2007. So program management can track enterprise projects progress in an EPM style.
For the integration between the 2 products, we are using the recently released Project Connector. One of the first things that went wrong was the installation of the TFS part of the connector.
The connector is divided in three parts
- The Server component - The website where you can configure the projects associations and such
- The TFS component - The handler that intermediates the interaction between TFS and Project Server. (flow of information between the 2 systems)
- Project Server Component - The handlers that run inside project server to handle events
The first problem, happened when the TFS component wouldn't run. Neither the web services that subscribe to TFS events, nor the website (both were installed in the TFS machine). When this happened, i was called to see what was happening, and why such a simple procedure was failing.
I've put some traces on the network to watch the traffic between components. The calls just returned 404 errors. Everything seemed to be fine in the configuration, the virtual directories,the files where there etc. That didn't make any sense.
Then i asked, which machine did you install it? The TFS Server, i scratched my head, and then the error seemed familiar.
It turns out, the configuration asks in which website the components should be installed, the default option is the default web site. The person just accepted it, forgetting that in the TFS machine the default website holds Sharepoint Services (which is configure to suck the life of every request it can get it's hands on :-))So when installing the components in the TFS server,you have two choices
- Install it on a different website (recommended)
- Install it on the default website and in the WSS administration put an exception rule so WSS doesn't handle the calls to the components. But this leads to another problem, sites inside WSS run with a minimal trust configuration, which leads to other problems in the connectors. So you have to tweak their web.config to increase the trust level of the sites. So i would recommend to not use the default web site. :-)
So beware, if you are installing the connector, don't make the mistake we did, it will save you some time. :-) Unfortunately the documentation doesn't mention this issue, so even if you read you can wind up losing some time with this little gotcha. :-)