April 12, 2006

Updating and Monitoring the Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse

Depending on your deployment of Team Foundation Server, you may or may not have complete control over the default rate of cube processing (or updating) of 30 minutes. However, if you do happen to have the correct amount of rights you can initiate, via Team Foundation Server web services, the cube to process manually. In fact, you are instructed to do this in the various upgrade and install instructions provided with the shipping bits.

As an exercise as well as to provide me with a tool to use on my desktop to force processing without opening up SQL Management Studio or logging into the box so that I can execute the web service manually, I wrote a simple tray app tool to provide quick and easy access to this functionality of Team Foundation Server.

It's pretty simple. Just set the proper settings in the config file and execute the executable. It will put an icon in your tray that you can right click and tell to process. The colors and tooltips of the icon will change depending on the status of the warehouse.

Enjoy!