So I have join the club of people that have problems with using Cisco VPN Client

If you are starring at the screen and see a messages like: “Unable to establish VPN” or “The VPN client agent was unable to create the interrocess communication depot” you may be in luck.

Assuming that you have checked the oblivious like, correct username/password or right server connection you may be a victim of “Internet Connection Sharing”.

I have been running Window Server 2008 R2 for some time and love it because of the power of Hyper-V with regards to managing my virtual environments.  One thing that I have done is shared my Wireless Adapter with my virtual Adapter so I can get internet connectivity to my VMs while I am connected to WIFI.

Little that I knew that it would interfere with my ability to use Cisco VPN.  I even un-installed and try to re-install the client to be greeted by more errors:

At the end all I had to do is to disable “Internet Connection Sharing” and Cisco VPN started to work.

I hope it will save you some time.

Accessing TFS2010 from Visual Studio 2008

I have run several times into a question: Can I (How Do I) connect to TFS2010 from Visual Studio 2008? The answer is YES you can, and here what you need to do:

1. Make sure that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 has been installed

2. Download and install Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for TFS 2010.

3. Configure connection to your TFS server.

In TFS2010 we now have ability to host multiple collections, groups of Team Project, so as result when accessing to TFS2010 we need to know what collection we are interested in.

General TFS connection constructed like:

http(s)://{Server Name}:{Port}/{Directory}/{Collection Name}

where as:

• {Server Name}, either the name of the server TFS2010 installed on (application tier) or Fully Qualify Domain Name that would resolve to the location of your TFS server
• {Port }, the port configured for TFS access
• {Path}, the path to installed TFS services
• {Collection Name}, name of TFS Team Collection

If you have installed TFS2010 following default suggestions it would be something like that: http://{Server Name}:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection

For example if you have downloaded VS2010 RTM Virtual Machine from Brian Keller’s blog then you can access TFS server from VS2008 by configuring connection string as:

4. But there are limitations on what you can do from Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer with TFS2010, some of the big ones:

• Creating new Projects
• Working with Hierarchical WorkItem Queries
• Managing Builds
• Reports
• etc

Due to all the new features made to TFS2010.