MDT 2013 "no properties are available for this object" when viewing task sequence properties.

It was brought to my attention by a young pad-wan learner tonight that if you follow the instructions at the DeploymentGuys blog, the "Customising the MDT Task Sequence Editor" one, and then open a task sequence in the workbench, an error occurs resulting in a crash of the workbench console.

The specific error appears as below (result of a right click/properties of the task sequence).

I reviewed the XML that resulted from following the DeploymentGuys post at XMLValidation.com and it pointed out an error starting at the first quote added by the copy/paste operation from the blog.

Interesting...

I checked the broken actions.xml against one I knew to be good using BeyondCompare. Here in this screenshot they are "actions-old.xml" for the broken one, and "actions.xml" for the one from my working deployment share. See below:

So...whats up with that?! I am going to stab at the dark here and say "This is a ansi/unicode type issue". My paste was from IE to notepad.exe using Windows Server 2012 R2. Same repro in Chrome and notepad.exe on Windows 10 Pro.

For those who want a working actions.xml, here you go:

Actions.xml file download link

Hope that can save you some time :)

I'm going to contact some folks and find out more on this, but hopefully this helps someone, somewhere, sometime.

Cheers,

Jeff "the dude" Stokes