More than a year ago, I posted a reference to Jeff Atwood's post on extending the evaluation period for Windows Vista.

KB article 948472 describes the process for Windows Server 2008 and includes instructions on installing an evaluation version of Windows Server 2008 from the standard media as well has how to set up a recurring task in Windows Task Scheduler to extend the evaluation period to 240 days.

How to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period

SUMMARY

This article describes how to extend, or re-arm, the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period. The evaluation period is also known as the "activation grace" period. These instructions apply to any edition of Windows Server 2008. This includes evaluation copies.

INTRODUCTION

Evaluating Windows Server 2008 software does not require product activation. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 may be installed without activation, and it may be evaluated for 60 days. Additionally, the 60-day evaluation period may be reset (re-armed) three times. This action extends the original 60-day evaluation period by up to 180 days for a total possible evaluation time of 240 days.

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Unfortunately there are several types of projects that do not work natively with MSBuild.  Jim Lamb, program manager for Team Build, has put together a few posts with pointers on how to get these to work with Team Build.

• Project System Compatibility with Team Build
• SQL Server Integration Services and Team Build
• BizTalk Server and Team Build

In the past I've written posts on tools for TFS on CodePlex.  I'm happy to say that there are now too many to show in a post.  I'd encourage you to take a look using this query for TFS on CodePlex.

A couple of people have sent me email about new tools for TFS on CodePlex, and I thought I'd mention them. here.

TeamReview

The first one is TeamReview.  Here's part of the description from the main page.

Using Work Items to facilitate the code review process creates a completely in-IDE code review experience, the ability to project-manage the code review tasks, and the opportunity to get new value from the code review process through code review forensics.

There's also a nice set of screen shots that walk you through the use of the tool.  Here's one as a bit of a teaser.

InfoKiosk

The second one is a tool that uses Silverlight to display information on bugs and builds in full screen mode for a continuous slide show view.

The fine folks that support our customers have started a new blog:  Developer Support Team Foundation Server.  With posts by Trevor Hancock, Jim Saunders, and others on topics ranging from issues with TFS to the BPA (Best Practices Analyzer), you'll want to subscribe to this blog.  They also plan to post monthly summaries of publicly released hotfixes (patches).

Here's a sample of some of their recent posts.

• Setting up Team Foundation Server 2008 for HTTPS / SSL
• Project Creation with Scrum Fails After TFS Upgrade (2005 -> 2008)
• Installing 64-bit WSS Extensions for TFS 2008 on MOSS 2007

Check it out!

If you install Service Pack 1 for .NET 3.5 on the server (application tier) without also installing Service Pack 1 for TFS 2008, you will not be able to view permissions in version control.  None of your data has been lost.  What has happened is that the code in ASP.NET that serializes the permission data on the server does not work properly when .NET 3.5 SP1 is installed, resulting in empty lists being returned to the client.  TFS 2008 SP1 contains a change that makes it work.

Your choices are either to uninstall SP1 for .NET 3.5 or install SP1 for TFS 2008.

We've heard from a few customers that they would prefer not to have the build labels deleted when builds are deleted.  In Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 we added a feature to control whether build labels are deleted when the build is deleted.  This feature is really a stop-gap measure, and it changes the behavior for build deletion on the entire server (i.e., you cannot change it for particular build definitions).  In TFS 2010, we've added GUI options to allow you to control this for each build definition, and the setting is stored in the database along with the build definition.

To use the feature in 2008 SP1, add the following to the appSettings section in the web.config on the server (application tier).

<appSettings>

  <add key="PreserveLabelsOnBuildDeletion" value="true" />

</appSettings>

It's not clear at this point whether the TFS 2010 upgrade process will be able to automatically migrate this setting to the build definitions.  In the worst case, you may need to enable this setting on each build definition after upgrading to TFS 2010.

The build summary view (sometimes called the build report) in TFS 2005 and 2008 leaves a lot to be desired.  We wanted to rework it in TFS 2008 but lacked the time.  Well, we've completely revamped it for TFS 2010.

Chris Burrows has posted screen shots he captured from Jim Lamb's interview and screencast on TFS Build 2010 (it's basically a hybrid, which works really well).

I'll post one of the screen shots here, which shows a compilation error.  For the rest and the explanation of this one, take a look at Chris' post.  You'll be able to see it in action in the new CTP that'll be released this fall.

Mike Fourie has released the first version of MSBuild Extensions Pack on CodePlex.  This is a great collection of quality tasks for MSBuild that you can also use in Team Foundation Build.

The MSBuild Extension Pack is the successor to the FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite and provides a collection of over 170 MSBuild tasks designed for the .NET 3.5 Framework. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following:

• System Items: Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound
• Code: Assemblies, CAB Files, Code Signing, File Detokenisation, GUID’s, Mathematics, Strings, Threads, Zip
• Applications: BizTalk 2006, Email, IIS7, MSBuild, SourceSafe, StyleCop, Team Foundation Server, Visual Basic 6, WMI

Mike's goal is to make this the standard MSBuild task repository. He's looking to add more tasks and make these better. If you're interested in contributing, send him email.

Check it out!

Mohammad Jalloul, a developer on the Developer Division Engineering team, has released a new tool on CodePlex called TFS Check-in Validation Tool.  This tool provides the ability to have a checkin validating by a build prior to being checked in.  This is similar to a feature in TFS 2010 called Gated Checkin, which is integrated into VS and TFS (you can learn more about Gated Checkin and other TFS Build 2010 features in this video).  With both of these the goal is to prevent build breaks from being checked in by validating them beforehand.  I refer to this as "pessimistic" continuous integration in contrast to traditional continuous integration where developers check in optimistically and react to build breaks.  Mohammad's tool gives you the capability to do this now with Team Foundation Server 2008.

Mohammad has put a lot of effort into this tool and already has an internal team using it.  He has also recruited William Bartholomew, a VSTS MVP, to be a project coordinator.  I look forward to hearing what you think about it and encourage you to try it out.

TFS Check-in Validation Tool

Project Description

The TFS Check-in Validation Tool extends TFS Team Build 2008 by enabling buddy build queuing (pre-checkin), validating checkins using shelvesets, and build agent pooling, all from the VS 2008 IDE.

TFS Check-in Validation Tool Features

The TFS Check-in Validation Tool is a collection of tools that allows you to perform the following functionality that is not provided by Team Build 2008:

• Check-in Validation/Buddy Build functionality allows running buddy builds against one or more shelvesets by utilizing your existing Team Build Definition
• Add one line to your TFSBuild.proj script to make it buddy-build enabled
• The ability to check in shelvesets upon buddy build success
• Ability to have a buddy build or a regular build request go against a Build Agent pool rather than queuing against the single build agent that was configured in the build definition
• Custom MSBuild tasks that extend Team Build to allow running buddy builds
• The ability to assign a weight to each build agent in the pool (for example, you might want to favor the agents with better hardware by assigning a higher weight to them to get them selected more often) and also to restrict your build pool size to a subset of the agents registered with the Team Project

Screenshots

See the Installation Guide for more detailed screenshots:
http://www.codeplex.com/BuddyBuild/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx

Martin Woodward has written a great post that describes a feature that was added in TFS 2008 SP1 to reduce the amount of work item tracking metadata cached by the client.  Depending on the number of team projects on your server and the number of fields and rules used by all work item types, this could result in a nice performance gain, particularly for remote users.

Filtering WIT Client Meta-data

In TFS 2008 SP1, a new feature was quietly introduced, WIT Client Metadata Filtering.  This feature could boost the performance of your Team Foundation Server experience, reduce the amount of traffic flowing over your network and reduce the data porosity of your TFS instance. Yet it is not enabled by default. In this post I'm going to explain the feature, what it does and how and when to enable it.

more...

One of the new features available in TFS 2008 SP1 is that a TSWA URL can be configured in the server so that checkin notification emails will have links to the Team System Web Access page for the changeset, which allows you to see the diffs for each of the changes.

You can find the documentation for this feature at How to: Configure Work Item Hyperlinks to use Team System Web Access.  You must also install the following fix (QFE) in order to use the feature: KB957196 - Checkin event e-mail alert notification doesn't work (download).  Without the fix, turning on the new feature will result in checkin notification emails not working at all.

You may be wondering why work item tracking email notifications do not also use the TSWA URL.  This unfortunately fell through the cracks.  The four simple manual steps that you can take to enable this are documented at Links for Team System Web Access 2008 Power Tool are enabled only for check-in notification e-mail.

If you are curious about how to construct your own links to TSWA pages, you can find documentation here.

 [UPDATE 10/21/08]  If you want to remove the TSWA URL from registration, you can run the following command after installing the hotfix (the RTM version of the command does not support removing the TSWA URL).

tfsadminutil configureconnections /tswauri:

Brian Keller has recorded a series of interviews, some of which include demos, that are being published on Channel 9.  You can find them at Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel 9.

Some of the videos have already been posted.  Be sure to check the page periodically or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with them as they come out.

The week of September 29th is Visual Studio Team System 2010 week on Channel 9! We'll have 20 videos going live this week featuring interviews with the Visual Studio Team System product team including several screencast demonstrations of the latest bits.

Stay tuned to http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ for all of the action. Here's the lineup:

Monday, September 29th:
- Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

Architecture Day (Tuesday, September 30th):
- Cameron Skinner: Visual Studio Team System 2010 - Architecture
- "Top-down" design with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- "Bottom-up" Design with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect
- ARCast.TV - Peter Provost on what’s coming for Architects in Visual Studio Team System

Business Alignment (Wednesday, October 1st):
- Achieving Business Alignment with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Enterprise Project Management with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Requirements Management and Traceability with Visual Studio Team System 2010

Software Quality (Thursday, October 2nd):
- Better Software Quality with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Manual Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010

Team Foundation Server (Friday, October 3rd):
- Brian Harry: Team Foundation Server 2010
- Branching and Merging Visualization with Team Foundation Server 2010
- Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management with Mario Rodriguez
- Team Foundation Server 2010 Setup and Administration
- An early look at Team Foundation Build 2010 with Jim Lamb
- A first look at Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2010
- Update on Team Foundation Server Migration and Synchronization

Stay tuned, we hope you enjoy it!

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