I’ve been working on customizing a process template here. Nothing special there. I’m sure you know the process – get the template, tweak, adjust, tweak – upload to the (test) server – create a project and make sure that all looks OK. Well, while I was doing this today, I came across an mysterious error when creating the new project. Keep in mind that the template uploaded just fine … this was when selecting the template for a new project. Here’s the error:
Event Description: TF30169: The New Team Project Wizard was unable to download the process template My Process Template.
Exception Type: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Zip.ZipException
Exception Message: A file name specified within the zip file is invalid. It contains a desktop.ini file, which could be used to run authorized code.
A desktop.ini file? What on earth would that be doing in there? I suspect that this is a typo; I think they meant which could be used to run unauthorized code. Don’t get me wrong – this is a Very Good Thing. It shows that someone was thinking about the types of files in the templates and making sure that nothing harmful accidently got in there.
What happened, as you may suspect, is that there was a desktop.ini file in the folder for the process template. How it got there or why is a mystery but there it was. And, apparently, when the process template is uploaded, everything in that folder on down is also uploaded. You can see the contents of the process template as it is returned from the server in your local temp folder. If the project creation succeeds, it appears that this file is deleted so you will have to be (relatively) quick about it if you want to see it. The template will have a name like 345.tmp; a number + a .tmp extension. It’s a zip file (as the error message so nicely points out) so you can change the extension to .zip and open it up. When I did this – lo and behold – there certainly was a desktop.ini file in there. Deleting it from the template directory and re-uploading the file did, of course, solve the problem.
One lesson that I want to pass on from this – when you upload a new process template using the Process Template Manager, it uploads the entire contents of the process template folder. So make sure that you don’t have any extraneous stuff sitting in there (like desktop.ini, for example!).