TFS / TSWA Custom Controls - "Unable to create workitem control 'ControlName'."

I have been trying to create a fairly simple custom control to be used by the TFS Web Access application. At my day job, we use TFS extensively and are working towards a solution that allows us to use it exclusively too. One of the major drawbacks we are currently facing is the lack of a built in time entry control. Another colleague of mine has created a time entry control in Silverlight to facilitate use in the two environments. In Team Explorer, a simple browser control was added to a tab to house the Time Entry component. It works well though it still has some minor quirks. I have been assigned to port the same concept (preferably to use the same Silverlight control) to the web side.

The issue I have run into is that the Work Item Template does not have any controls to support Silverlight or any other web site redirection. My thought was to use an IFrame to embed the Silverlight right in but I am not aware of any way to use the existing controls to support it. My next thought was to create a very simple server side control that will just render an IFrame directed to the appropriate URL. The new control is working in test environments (dummy pages), however, when I try to integrate it into the Work Item Template, it fails every time.

I have received numerous errors simply indicating that the control can not be created. Using FUSLOGVW.exe, I began to dig into the issue. I've verified in some cases that the library, dependencies, and the .wicc file are all properly located and found. Still, the control can't be created. I've tried modifiying the wicc file, changing namespaces, and updating the web.config (restarting IIS after every change). Every attempt still fails but now I'm getting different errors.

In the wicc file for the assembly name, if I include the ".dll" at the end of the assembly name, it searches for "assembly.dll.dll" and/or "assembly.dll.exe". Obviously it will not find a file by either of those names. If I remove the ".dll" at the end of the assembly name, it searches for just the assembly name with no extension at all....which again, it will never find.

So the million dollar question is what is going on here? I'm sure it is something stupid that I am overlooking. These things usually turn out that way which only raises the frustrations, but I will figure it out and post my resolution when I do.

2 comments:

Dmytro Lapshyn said... / November 5, 2009 at 10:57 AM  

Just in case - have you seen this?

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/shair/archive/2008/10/22/how-to-manage-custom-controls-in-team-system-and-web-access.aspx

Michael Doyon said... / November 6, 2009 at 3:35 PM  

Dmytro, I did end up finding Shai Raiten's blog. His posts were quite valuable while I had been developing this control. The issue turned out to be that I was missing a reference. Thanks for the comment.

Post a Comment