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.

Resolved: WCAT: Invalid code received - Run error detected, terminating clients

When implementing WCAT for load testing for the first time I ran into the overly vague error message below.

All clients connected, Test beginning.
 Invalid code received.
  message: Run error detected, terminating clients...
  message: Terminating all instances of wcclient...
  message: Terminating all local instances of wcctl.exe...

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.

Resolved: IDRAC Drive Error Either Virtual Media is detached or redirection for the selected virtual disk drive is already in use

I haven't used Dell servers much in an enterprise environment, so working with their IDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller) controllers was a little new to me. So when I got the error message below when trying to mount an ISO, I was a little confused at first.

Drive Error Either Virtual Media is detached or Virtual Media redirection for the selected virtual disk drive is already in use.

Resolved: Error message Windows is unable to install to the selected location. Error: 0x80300001 after loading additional drivers

There is a very misleading/deceptive error that you might run into when installing various versions of the Windows operating system. It typically happens when you load additional drivers for raid controllers, fiber cards, SCSI controllers, etc. That error is:

Error: "Windows is unable to install to the selected location. Error: 0x80300001."

How to Turn On Debug Logging for Group Policy

When you are troubleshooting group policy issues, it's helpful to turn on some additional logging. Unfortunately, it's not just a simple switch you turn on. You have to know what you are doing to get those logs.