Martin Kulov's Blog

Last week it was the MVP Summit 2008 at Seattle. I had a chance to attend it also this year. Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie were answering questions during the keynote and we had a great three days with the VSTS product group. Many things to come in Rosario so make sure that you keep in touch what is coming out in the next releases.

Here are some fresh ones. April Rosario CTP is the longest expected one (more info below). Note the significant push in the architecture tools as also the new build system based on Windows Workflow and the improved historical debugger and test tools available in the previous CTP. There are some very useful video tutorials that you must checkout after downloading the release.

TFS Power Tools March 2008 is also released (more info below). There is a very cool tool called TFSServerManager for monitoring current status of the TFS server. Also the Process Template Editor is now working with custom controls.

 

April Rosario CTP now available!

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/11/april-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx

Architecture Edition

• Exploring the existing code structure
• Designing process flow as activities
• Designing user interactions with systems
• Designing system functionality as components
• Visualizing and designing types in systems
• Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems

Development Edition

• Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
• Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
• Identify the test impact of code changes
• Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Database Edition

• Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
• Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
• Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
• Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.

Test Edition

• Planning a testing effort
• Executing manual test cases
• Verify the fix
• Automate a manual test and add validation.

Team Foundation Server

• Managing an Agile schedule
• Easier reporting from Excel
• Managing features with the CMMI Process
• A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
• An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
• A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
• A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
• Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
• Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements

 

March 2008 TFS Power Tools now available

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/21/march-2008-tfs-power-tools-now-available.aspx

Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls

TFSServerManager client

TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008

Work Item Template improvements Scriptable Team Project creation

Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms

Unshelve to a different branch

Improvements to tfpt review

Delete global lists in the work item tracking system

Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes

Performance improvements in tfpt online

 

 

Labels: Rosario, TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:53 PM |

Paul Hacker is a VSTS MVP guy that started something very cool - a TFS Times magazine. He already have few issues published. Make sure you go and read them - it is a great resource of summarized information about VSTS with real world tips and tricks from VSTS MVPs.

Make sure you subscribe so you can receive future publications also. It is free of charge.

Also Paul Hacker, Mickey Gousset and Martin Woodward recently started a new podcast called Radio TFS.

It is about 40 min long and you can listen to the latest podcast here and subscribe.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:20 AM |

Get Latest Version may not work properly in some circumstances with TFS 2008. I recently found how to reproduce this strange problem that I was experiencing from some time. It happens that if you have already set up a working project on your machine (after you have resolved possible problems with Web Application Projects in the initial project setup), the project may fail to update when you ask to Get Latest Version even using Get Specific Version option is on. The reason for that may be a newly added project to your solution. When someone adds a new project to your solution VS2008 automatically creates a new mapping for this project. So if your workspace mapping before the update is like $\MyProject - > c:\projects\MyProject, when you as for the get latest version you will find that VS has created additional mapping for the new project like $\MyProject\NewProject -> c:\projects\MyProject\NewProject. After that point, for reasons that I am not aware of, get latest version does not work any more. To solve this problem you have to open the Source Control panel from Team Explorer and in the workspace dialog box to edit workspace mappings and delete this new entry.

If you do not edit workspace mappings you will most probably get this error:

---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
Source Control Explorer

All files are up to date.

No files were updated because the requested file versions were previously downloaded.

To force an update, use the "Get Specific Version" command with the "Overwrite all..." option checked.
---------------------------
OK  
---------------------------

Labels: TFS, Tools and Tips

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 4:55 AM |

Team Foundation Power Tools for VS2008 is out.

MSSCCI Provider is also updated for 2008 object model.

Merry Christmas and Happy New 2008!!!

From Brian Harry's blog:

New in this Release

• Find in Source Control tool is an addition to the Team Explorer menu that provides the ability to locate files and folders in source control by the item’s status or with a wildcard expression.

• Open a selected folder in Windows Explorer straight from Team Explorer. This feature allows you to jump straight to the mapped folder location from within Source Control Explorer.

• Quick Label feature that allows labels to be easily applied to a given selection of files and folders in the Source Control Explorer.

• Build Notification tool that runs in the Windows task bar notification area monitoring the status of the build definitions you have specified. It can be configured to show notifications when builds are queued, started, or completed for multiple build definitions spanning multiple Team Foundation Servers.

• Additional TFPT.EXE commands for configuring Team Explorer connection settings (tweakui) and for destroying Work Items and Work Items Type Definitions (destroyWI, destroyWITD).

• Updates to the TFS Best Practices Analyzer for use with a Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server deployment.

• The Process Template Editor is updated for use with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. It also has several improvements, including: the ability to launch standalone w/o a Visual Studio installation, performance improvements, improved discoverability and bug fixes.

• Bug fixes and removal of Power Tools that are now included within Team Foundation Server:

• Annotate and Treedif are now included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer; however, Annotate remains is still available in the command-line tool (TFPT.EXE).

• TestToolsTask is included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server as part of Team Foundation Build.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:58 AM |

Web Access Power Tool for Team System is just released. Brian Harry just announced the awesome news. As I said in my previous post - these guys at MS do not sleep. And it is 4am already and I can hardly catch up with the news.

Message to the Visual Studio product team at MS - guys, please take a break; we need to sleep :)

Here is the feature list (first one is my best friend) and VSTS Web Access 2008 Power Tool download page:

New linkable web pages - This is, perhaps, the coolest feature in the release. It allows you to easily link to work items, work item queries, work item query results, Changesets, File/Folder history, file differences, file contents and annotated views of files. This makes TSWA a far more powerful building block for integration with other applications. In fact, we've already started work to leverage this from notification emails so that you can get a richer experience. Because the notification emails are user configurable, you can read Neno Loje's poston how to modify work item alert emails to use TSWA links. Look forward to some future suggestions on how you can customize your checkin notification to get a richer experience using TSWA. See Buck's post for details on how to use the new TSWA links.

Custom work item controls - Web Access now supports custom work item controls. Now it is possible to create a rich client version and a web version of custom work item controls and have your fully customized experience available no matter which interface your users access. You'll find documentation for writing custom controls in the SDK folder under you TSWA installation folder.

Team Build support - Web Access has been updated to support several of the new features in TFS 2008 for build automation. Most importantly, it allows you to view the queue of builds and queue new builds.

Performance improvements - Every release of Web Access includes more performance improvements. The more we use the tool internally, the more we learn about it. Every time we find issues, we fix them and release them to you as soon as possible. The big performance improvements in this release are around server memory consumption.

No more TSWA users group - The 2005 Power Tool required that you manage a user group of web access users for security reasons. We've improved the server side impersonation and directory management to eliminate the need for this. TSWA can now manage access securely just using the permission settings you already have and no longer requires a "special" restricted group. This should make managing TSWA easier.

Documentation - It's not extensive but should be enough for you to find your way around TSWA. You'll find it located here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892990(VS.90).aspx

Labels: TFS, Visual Studio 2008

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:57 AM |

In TFS there is an option to make baseless merge. This a kind of merge you want to do between two folders that you haven’t initially branched from each other. The smart part of this process is that when you make the baseless search, TFS is creating a ‘base’ for future merges so it can detect what have been changed specifically.

In ProPeople SCM infrastructure I am creating a number of builds responsible for each project. The idea is that each project gets build on demand by the QA or PM and it is automatically deployed on the development server. No manual steps required (except clicking to start the build :)).

After I created about 7 of those builds, it occurred to me that maintaining them would be very time consuming task in future. Especially, if you want to update all of them. So I decide to make them a base for future merge. Baseless merge can be done only with the command line tool so I run the command “tf merge /baseless ”. For sourcepath I wrote the location of specially created template folder for my builds and for destpath I wrote the location in TFS of one of my already created builds. After running the command the IDE got notified of the change and show the folder with pending change – merge. I checked in the folder thinking everything was fine.

I decided to make a quick test and changed the template build file, checked it in and selected Merge to merge my changed. For my surprise the folder list for available Target branch to merge was empty.

After a little search I found out that I have to use the /recursive option for tf merge if I want to merge all the files in the folder also. Anyway, who is going to merge only the folder itself without all its contents.

Bottom line: when you use TF command line, do not forget to set the /recursive option for all operations that must be applied to all files in the selected folder.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 5:47 AM |

There are some many things to write about that I can hardly catch up. Don’t the guys at Microsoft take a vacation so we can rest also?

Microsoft released Visual Studio Team System Web Access. This long name is self explanatory. With this long awaited web access to VSTS, you can enjoy working with work items using the web. The product now is fully CSS (Customer Support Services) supported. If you remember Microsoft acquired DevBiz and they immediately provided v1.0 for free to all TFS licensed users. The release that MS is providing now is tested for security and performance and has been dogfooded for couple of months in MS. Here is the list of fixes and new features that has been implemented.

Brian Harry also provided nice screenshots if you want to first check how the product looks like.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:38 AM |

Come chat with the Team System product team – July 3rd

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the upcoming Orcas CTP.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3rd , 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

-or-
Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Labels: TFS, Visual Studio Orcas

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:32 AM |

Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio TFS Project Server 2007 Connector. This release is long awaited by the TFS community since it allows integration between the developer IDE and MS Project Server. Out of the box TFS allows only integrating with Microsoft Office Project 2007, which is the client tool for Microsoft Project Server.

Along with the binaries, you can also look at the very valuable End User Guide and Setup Guide.

I am planning to give it a try in the next weeks and will let you know if it is working for me.

From the TFS Connector site:

The Connector synchronizes Project, Resource and Task data between the two systems. Project Managers and Resource Managers continue to work in the EPM environment while the development team works in the development environment, i.e. TFS, and data seamlessly flows between the two systems. Updates to work items in TFS are automatically applied to the corresponding assignments and tasks in Project Server and vice versa. Project Managers have complete control over the inflow of the actuals into the project plan. In addition, resource management functions for all development projects, like managing time and utilization for resources working across multiple projects, team staffing etc. can be performed in Project Server. Lastly, portfolio and program level reports can easily be generated for projects being executed in TFS and managed in Project Server.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:03 AM |

Microsoft acquires devBiz, the company who develops TeamPlain.
By now TeamPlain is the only available solution for accessing Visual Studio Team System work items by the web. TeamPlain is now available for free download. You only need CAL to access the TFS server.
TeamPlain will be available in the next TFS Power Tools. At some stage, Microsoft plans to deliver TeamPlain as a part of TFS installation.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:42 AM |