Progress on CodePlex pull requests

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Brian Harry MS — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:44:14 GMT

Ahh, now you understand the purgatory of 2 year+ product cycles. By last fall, we were done with all major planned work and just working on feedback on the work we had done, rounding out and polishing. We weren't, generally, doing new big things. Fortunately, I think we're in the process of changing the way that works.

I'm happy to engage and explain just about anything we have done or are doing. I too am seeing the trends and we are working to stay up with them.

As for build folders. There's a couple notable history things there. The first time the idea came up, I stopped it. The reason was that we have so many hierarchies in TFS already - source folders, query folders, area paths, iterations, work item tree queries, reports folders, document libraries, teams, etc, etc that I was becoming very concerned that we were making it too easy to create a mess. It seemed to me that we needed some way to reconcile these hierarchies so that, at least by default, they would correlate and we could provide a unified view over your assets. I asked the team to go think about this before adding yet another hierarchy. The second time it came up the Program Manager responsible for the area made the call that build favorites (that we built in TFS 11) would satisfy the need. We wanted to try that and then see what feedback we got.

I'm open to ideas on how better to engage.

Brian

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Allen Feinberg — Wed, 30 May 2012 01:13:50 GMT

Brian,

With that news I want to buy each and every every dev who's working on fixing the 259 character limit a beer. Just let me know where to send the check. North Carolina, India, Redmond? That's amazing. As for User Voice being setup too late for TFS 11...it was setup in 2011....but no matter....I hope it's not too late to use it for Dev12?

Help us your customers have a deep and rich dialog with you and the dev team, a conversation about what we're thinking about and what we are looking for, and how we're seeing things change. We don't need to talk about every feature or the schedule (you'll be late we know :-p ), we don't need to know your super secret competitive features either, but let us know that you are hearing us, let us help you understand just how quickly the world is changing, and help us understand that our investment on your platforms, your tools, and your products is gaining value not losing it.

Help me convince my developers understand why you made the investments where you did, and also where you didn't (I'm looking at you build folders and security).

Here's a bit of background:

It's incredible when I talked with this year's CS graduates (undergrad and Graduate) looking at entry level development positions(95k+), they expect HTML 5, they expect the tools facebook developers use (I was shocked to hear "Visual Studio what's that?"), bittorent for build deployments, development tools on the Mac(if it's good enough for Steve Jobs), Andriod and Iphone apps they'd built in the dorms, short dev cycles(we have 2 week sprints...they want 2 DAY sprints), and they don't care where(from home, from LA, from Vancouver) or when they work(8am, 2am, 6pm), and all I keep hearing about if ruby, ruby, ruby....

So while the world changes...at the end of the day it doesn't really change...but we need to dialog with you, and we need to help you understand the pain/shortcomings we have with your products, and we need to learn about WHY you built them the way you built them.

You're blog is great...as it most of the other ALM blogs...but let us work together to make the next TFS/VS better for all involved.

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Brian Harry — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:40:44 GMT

The problem with UserVoice was just that we set it up too late in the product cycle. By that point, all the big investment decisions had been made and most of the top user voice asks are big items. However, now that we're basically done with TFS 11, we're definitely looking at the UserVoice requests. In fact, I'll share a secret with you. One of the biggest UserVoice requests on VS is to fix the 259 character path length issue (and I hear it from customers all the time too) visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../2156195-fix-260-character-file-name-length-limitation. It's listed under VisualStudio but we have a part in it. We're just completing the work to extend server paths from 259 to about 400 characters. We'll see when it gets in your hands but it won't be 2015 (it will be before :)). You might ask why any limit at all? Well we use paths in indexes and SQL indexes have a limit of about 1000 bytes. Paths are unicode so 400 * 2 = 800. Add a few more columns and you're at 1000 pretty fast.

Anyway I think it will help people. The local path problem will still be annoying but you can now, at least, map a branch and get to use the full 259 characters under the branch rather than having to use sill super short branch names.

And the meta point is we're pulling things off UserVoice and implementing them. This isn't the only one but it's a good example.

Brian

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Allen Feinberg — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:25:58 GMT

Thanks for the conversation Brian. I hope it's something you guys get to working on somesort of PULL workflow before say 2015. The dev11 stuff looks great...but the GIT stuff looks really compelling too...so while we have TFS11 soon...I'm hoping that in the next year or two you guys can catch up and have a really great PULL feature without us having to wait and lose our devs to GIT. Heck I'll take HTML formatting in the checkin dialog/pending changes as a stop gap.

Keep up the great work and help us engage in the conversation. BTW, uservoice seemed like a great idea but it's pretty quiet from the Microsoft folks: visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../30925-team-foundation-server

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Brian Harry MS — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:23:20 GMT

Allen, It's something we've talked about but we don't have a concrete timeline for at this time. It's definitely an appealing workflow for some teams.

Brian

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Allen Feinberg — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:01:37 GMT

When will we get pull requests from TFS? It's a great feature and the rich discussions that happen on GITHUB from PULL requests look really interesting.

re: Progress on CodePlex pull requests

Stephen — Sun, 20 May 2012 04:56:11 GMT

I love that you work off customer/user input.

After the unneeded and unasked for UI overhaul to vs 11 and the missing requested features (ie xp support), it is nice to know that the ALM / TFS team knows how to develop software.