How to Setup Visual Studio (TFS) Test Agents in the Cloud

We ran into some issues trying to get the Visual Studio Test Agents to register and communicate with the Visual Studio Test Controller when the controller is inside our network, and the agents are in the cloud. There are some strange quirks that need to be addressed before this will work. However, following these steps you should be able to run test agents on VMs in Amazon AWS EC2, Microsoft Windows Azure, etc.

Resolution: Visual Studio Test Agent Unable to Connect to the controller. There is no agent registered...

Problem: I discovered a weird quirk with the Visual Studio Test Agents (a.k.a. TFS Test Agents). We were trying to set them up to do some load testing, and were getting the error below.

 Unable to connect to the controller on 'MyController:6901'. There is no agent with the name 'MyAgent' registered on the controller.

If you click on the "View Log" link after attempting to configure the Test Agent, you will see the follwing detailed error:

 V, 2013/10/28, 17:33:25.342, Observed that agent 'MyAgent' does not exist. Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Exceptions.EqtException: There is no agent with
the name 'MyAgent' registered on the controller.

Connection Pooling for Commerce Server 2007 and 2009

With as little as a couple hundred unique visitors on a website, we were seeing close to 300 SQL logons per second coming from Commerce Server. Every hit to SQL was creating a new connection. Luckily, this is a quick and easy fix to get Commerce Server to start reusing open connections to SQL by using connection pooling.

Take into account though, if you are using impersonation on your Commerce Server website then this is a security risk. If a one user reuses the SQL connection of a different user, they can assume the security rights of that previous user.

Resolution: Error during encryption or decryption. System error code 997 in SharePoint

I was recently ran into an issue in SharePoint where my Central Administration web app disappeared. When I tried to redeploy Central Administration, I was confronted with the error below.

An exception of type System.ArgumentException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Error during encryption or decryption. System error code 997.

Everything I saw online said the only option was to create a new config database. Personally, I thought that seemed a bit extreme. Well, I found a better option that worked for me, and will probably work for you too.

$10,000 Worth of Microsoft Training Videos For Free

Microsoft puts on a huge training event every once per year, per continent called TechEd. This event is great! It offers hundreds of different focused training sessions every year that you can choose from to further your education. However, the registration fee alone is over $2,000 (standard pricing), then you have travel and hotel expenses on top of that. Because of that, this is not something that everybody can afford to attend.

If you cannot go to Teched, you can still watch the sessions from previous years for free online. These videos won't give you the full conference experience, but they are a great learning resource that's available for free.