The other day I wrote a post with a summary of links for upgrading team project settings to turn on all of the new features, such as code review, task board, and more.

There are a couple more things I want to point out that you’ll want to tweak after the upgrade.

First is licensing for the feature set.  The default setting is Standard.  You can choose to set the default to Full if all of your users are licensed for Premium, Ultimate, or Test Professional 2012 (see the editions page).  If not, you can add the people or groups who are licensed for full.  Only users with Full access will get the following features.

• Backlog and Sprint Planning Tools
• Request and Manage Feedback

Without adding licensing access to the feature set, you will get "TF400409: You do not have licensing rights to access this feature: Backlog and Sprint Planning Tools" (you may see other features listed, depending on what you try access). if you try to access the task board or product backlog.

From the Welcome Page, click on Administer Team Foundation Server and then click on the Web Access tab.  To change the default, click on Full and then click on “Set as default web access” to make it the default.  The screen shot shows what you’ll see after making the change.  Note that the “Limited” setting is for users who don’t have a CAL and that you want to grant access to see their work items and file new ones (also known as work item only view in the TFS 2010).

Second, while we have a great local workspaces feature that is new for TFS 2012 and you can easily switch a server workspace to a local workspace, you may want to keep your workspace a server workspace if it is extremely large (about 50,000 files for a spinning disk, higher for SSD).  Internally, our dev workspaces are often 250,000 files or more (getting them trimmed down is an ongoing effort).  We’ve introduced a feature in TFS 2012 where checkouts in VS 2012 are completely asynchronous if you enable the setting on the TFS 2012 server.  That means that there’s never a pause in VS when it checks out a file you are editing – it happens in the background.

As a consequence of turning on this setting, TFS disables exclusive checkout (any existing ones are converted to exclusive checkin locks) and the get latest on checkout feature.  You can find the documentation here.  You’ll also see in this dialog that you can control whether newly created workspaces default to server or local (out of the box, the default is local workspaces, since we believe that’s what the vast majority of folks will want most of the time).

To get to this dialog, choose Team –> Team Project Collection Settings from the main menu in VS, then choose Source Control.

[UPDATE 6/4/2012]  I've included the TF400409 error message.

Follow me at twitter.com/tfsbuck

As you’ve seen from Brian’s post and a bunch of others, Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012 RC are now available.  One of the consistent pain points in upgrading from one version of TFS to the next has been in upgrading the process for a team project.  With TFS 2012, we’ve taken our first steps toward making it dramatically better.  We now provide a wizard that is able to upgrade a team project’s process quickly and easily if you have made no customizations or only a limited set of customizations.  There are a number of resources available to help you through the process, and I wanted to provide a collection of links in one place.

First, Tim Elhajj, who creates documentation on administering TFS, has posted a very easy to read article on how to use this new configuration upgrade wizard, and the end of that page has links to MSDN for resolving errors and dealing with the differences in the Agile process template as well as adding new shared queries that will be automatically created for new team projects.  If you are new to upgrading TFS, you can start at the beginning to walk through the upgrade process.

Ewald Hofman, a program manager for work item tracking, has posted code for a tool to allow you to automate upgrading many team projects.  For those of you with lots of team projects, that’s really useful.  If you want to know more details on how the project upgrade process works, you’ll want to read his deep dive on it.  It’s called configuring features, but it is team project process upgrade.

What we’ve provided in 2012 is not going to solve the problem of upgrading significantly customized or custom-built processes, but it should go a long ways toward helping so many folks who don’t make significant changes to the process template.

Though not directly related to upgrading your team projects, you can get an overview of what all has changed VS and TFS 2012 on the What’s New in Visual Studio 2012 RC page.

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Ivan Popek has been spending a lot of time lately digging into TFS 11.  He has written a series of posts on the APIs for teams in TFS 11, and he explains the burn down chart trend lines.

• TFS11 API: Query Teams and Team Members

• TFS11 API: Reading the Team Configuration – Iterations and Areas

• TFS11 API: Managing the Team Iteration Schedule

• TFS11 API: Managing Team Administrators

• TFS11 API: Customizing the Process Configuration

• Understanding how the Team WebAccess burndown chart works, Part 1

• Understanding how the Team WebAccess burndown chart works, Part 2

• Understanding how the Team WebAccess burndown chart works, Part 3

Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/tfsbuck

Jim Szubryt has written a post listing the perf counters available in all versions of TFS and calls out the new ones in TFS 11.  Check it out if you are looking at the performance of your server.

New Perfmon Counters With TFS 11 Beta

Whether you are a small company running TFS or a large Enterprise there may come a time for you too where performance of your TFS system may come into question and you will need to determine what to look at when “TFS seems to be running slow”. You should proactively be establishing a baseline of performance for your environment and Perfmon counters can help. Having this baseline will be extremely important in understanding the differences between what has changed from when the application was running properly and the state when it is not. I can attest to this from experiences I have had with when load testing a financial system a few years ago before it went live. We started capturing Perfmon counters prior to processing transactions and then ramped up the users/transactions created. We were able to identify and address memory and SAN issues before the system went live. Much better than doing this in a production environment and affecting real users.

With the upcoming release of TFS there will be additional counters to assist in identifying what may be affecting TFS. My intention with this post is to raise your awareness of what options you have and not to guide you through determining which value is indicating a performance issue. That task is left to you to measure against what they were when the system was running smoothly and what they are when it is not. If you need some help in setting up counter collection you can take a look at Grant Holliday’s post on Querying Perfmon data from SQL. He has another good post on Large TFS Performance characteristics. They are a couple years old however, they are still very relevant.

more…

Follow me at twitter.com/tfsbuck

Duat, a developer on Team Foundation Build, has written a blog post on how to resolve post-upgrade issues with your build workflow if your 2010 build workflow uses custom workflow activities that use the TFS client object model.

Your custom assemblies need update, or else, redirecting

Loading your custom assemblies in the TFS 11 build service process triggers loading TFS 2010 assemblies, and the Workflow Foundation (WF) services are not happy about that. Why?

The build process template, for a particular reason, references the TFS OM assemblies by their simple names. When there are more than one version of the same assembly present in the process, the WF services, while loading and validating the build workflow, attempts to resolve the simple-name references with best effort, and in this case it decides to fail with a namespace ambiguity error.

Here’s what you likely see when this issue occurs:

TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \TFS\Build MAIN: The root element of the build process template found at $/TFS/BuildProcessTemplates/MainDefaultTemplate.xaml (version C182) is not valid. (The build process failed validation. Details: Validation Error: Compiler error(s) encountered processing expression "New Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities.BuildSettings()".'BuildSettings' is ambiguous in the namespace 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities'.

more…

Philip wrote a simple app to list the work items associated with the changesets for a given path, and it’s in some ways an enhanced update of Naren’s post.

Given an URL to a collection and a server path (e.g., $/myproject/coolthing), it will list the work items that are associated with the most recent 25 checkins.  This sample shows how to use the linking service to convert the work item artifact URIs that are stored with the changesets to get the core work item fields (ID, assigned to, state, type, and title).

It will produce output like the following.

Id: 352694 Title: Improve performance of queuing servicing jobs on Azure.

You will need to reference the following DLLs to build this, all of which are found on the .NET tab of the Add Reference dialog in Visual Studio 2010.

• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll

using System; 
using System.Collections.Generic; 
using System.Diagnostics; 
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation; 
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; 
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client; 

namespace ListWorkItems 
{ 
    class Program 
    { 
        static void Main(string[] args) 
        { 
            if (args.Length < 2)
            { 
                Console.WriteLine("Usage: listworkitems <URL for TFS> <server path>"); 
                Environment.Exit(1); 
            } 

            TfsTeamProjectCollection tpc = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(args[0]));
            VersionControlServer vcs = tpc.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); 

            // Get the changeset artifact URIs for each changeset in the history query
            List<String> changesetArtifactUris = new List<String>(); 

            foreach (Object obj in vcs.QueryHistory(args[1],                       // path we care about ($/project/whatever) 
                                                    VersionSpec.Latest,            // version of that path
                                                    0,                             // deletion ID (0 = not deleted) 
                                                    RecursionType.Full,            // entire tree - full recursion
                                                    null,                          // include changesets from all users
                                                    new ChangesetVersionSpec(1),   // start at the beginning of time
                                                    VersionSpec.Latest,            // end at latest
                                                    25,                            // only return this many
                                                    false,                         // we don't want the files changed
                                                    true))                         // do history on the path
            { 
                Changeset c = obj as Changeset; 
                changesetArtifactUris.Add(c.ArtifactUri.AbsoluteUri); 
            } 

            // We'll use the linking service to get information about the associated work items
            ILinking linkingService = tpc.GetService<ILinking>(); 
            LinkFilter linkFilter = new LinkFilter(); 
            linkFilter.FilterType = FilterType.ToolType; 
            linkFilter.FilterValues = new String[1] { ToolNames.WorkItemTracking };  // we only want work itms

            // Convert the artifact URIs for the work items into strongly-typed objects holding the properties rather than name/value pairs 
            Artifact[] artifacts = linkingService.GetReferencingArtifacts(changesetArtifactUris.ToArray(), new LinkFilter[1] { linkFilter });
            AssociatedWorkItemInfo[] workItemInfos = AssociatedWorkItemInfo.FromArtifacts(artifacts);

            // Here we'll just print the IDs and titles of the work items
            foreach (AssociatedWorkItemInfo workItemInfo in workItemInfos)
            { 
                Console.WriteLine("Id: " + workItemInfo.Id + " Title: " + workItemInfo.Title); 
            } 
        } 
    } 

    internal class AssociatedWorkItemInfo
    { 
        private AssociatedWorkItemInfo() 
        { 
        } 

        public int Id 
        { 
            get 
            { 
                return m_id; 
            } 
        } 

        public String Title 
        { 
            get 
            { 
                return m_title; 
            } 
        } 

        public String AssignedTo 
        { 
            get 
            { 
                return m_assignedTo; 
            } 
        } 

        public String WorkItemType 
        { 
            get 
            { 
                return m_type; 
            } 
        } 

        public String State 
        { 
            get 
            { 
                return m_state; 
            } 
        } 

        internal static AssociatedWorkItemInfo[] FromArtifacts(IEnumerable<Artifact> artifacts)
        { 
            if (null == artifacts)
            { 
                return new AssociatedWorkItemInfo[0];
            } 

            List<AssociatedWorkItemInfo> toReturn = new List<AssociatedWorkItemInfo>(); 

            foreach (Artifact artifact in artifacts)
            { 
                if (artifact == null)
                { 
                    continue; 
                } 

                AssociatedWorkItemInfo awii = new AssociatedWorkItemInfo();

                // Convert the name/value pairs into strongly-typed objects containing the work item info 
                foreach (ExtendedAttribute ea in artifact.ExtendedAttributes)
                { 
                    if (String.Equals(ea.Name, "System.Id", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 
                    { 
                        int workItemId; 

                        if (Int32.TryParse(ea.Value, out workItemId))
                        { 
                            awii.m_id = workItemId; 
                        } 
                    } 
                    else if (String.Equals(ea.Name, "System.Title", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 
                    { 
                        awii.m_title = ea.Value; 
                    } 
                    else if (String.Equals(ea.Name, "System.AssignedTo", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 
                    { 
                        awii.m_assignedTo = ea.Value; 
                    } 
                    else if (String.Equals(ea.Name, "System.State", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 
                    { 
                        awii.m_state = ea.Value; 
                    } 
                    else if (String.Equals(ea.Name, "System.WorkItemType", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) 
                    { 
                        awii.m_type = ea.Value; 
                    } 
                } 

                Debug.Assert(0 != awii.m_id, "Unable to decode artifact into AssociatedWorkItemInfo object."); 

                if (0 != awii.m_id)
                { 
                    toReturn.Add(awii); 
                } 
            } 

            return toReturn.ToArray(); 
        } 

        private int m_id; 
        private String m_title; 
        private String m_assignedTo; 
        private String m_type; 
        private String m_state; 
    } 
}

Philip, a dev on version control, recently helped with a question on how to get the TFS objects we use in our UI.  I thought I’d post since others may find it useful.

We recently had a request from a customer for a VS add-in that would be able to access the same TfsTeamProjectCollection and VersionControlServer objects that our own UI integration (such as the Team Explorer and Pending Changes toolwindow) are using. In this particular case the customer wanted to hook the BeforeCheckinPendingChange event from the VersionControlServer object and take a specific action when that occurred. But the framework shown in this piece of sample code is generic -- you can use it to get the very same VersionControlServer or WorkItemStore object that our integration is using to connect to TFS.

The trick here is to hook the ProjectContextChanged event on the TeamFoundationServerExt extensibility object. While that extensibility point won't give you the TfsTeamProjectCollection object directly, we can ask the TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory's static GetTeamProjectCollection method to retrieve it from a runtime cache. The cache is keyed by URI -- which (handily) is provided by TeamFoundationServerExt. By the time the ProjectContextChanged event fires, the ActiveProjectContext.DomainUri property has already been updated.

All the services in the TFS client object model are owned by the TfsTeamProjectCollection. Once we have it, we can call GetService to request the VersionControlServer object. There's only one per TfsTeamProjectCollection; the same holds true for WorkItemStore, IBuildServer, or any of the other client object model services you may be familiar with.

Happy extending!

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Extensibility;
using EnvDTE;
using EnvDTE80;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.VersionControl;

namespace MyAddin1
{
    /// <summary>The object for implementing an Add-in.</summary>
    /// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />
    public class Connect : IDTExtensibility2
    {
        /// <summary>Implements the constructor for the Add-in object. Place your initialization code within this method.</summary>
        public Connect()
        {
        }

        /// <summary>Implements the OnConnection method of the IDTExtensibility2 interface. Receives notification that the Add-in is being loaded.</summary>
        /// <param term='application'>Root object of the host application.</param>
        /// <param term='connectMode'>Describes how the Add-in is being loaded.</param>
        /// <param term='addInInst'>Object representing this Add-in.</param>
        /// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />
        public void OnConnection(object application, ext_ConnectMode connectMode, object addInInst, ref Array custom)
        {
            _applicationObject = (DTE2)application;
            _addInInstance = (AddIn)addInInst;

            try
            {
                m_tfsExt = _applicationObject.GetObject("Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationServerExt") as TeamFoundationServerExt;

                if (null != m_tfsExt)
                {
                    m_tfsExt.ProjectContextChanged += new EventHandler(m_tfsExt_ProjectContextChanged);

                    if (null != m_tfsExt.ActiveProjectContext)
                    {
                        // Run the event handler without the event actually having fired, so we pick up the initial state.
                        m_tfsExt_ProjectContextChanged(null, EventArgs.Empty);
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
            }
        }

        /// <summary>Implements the OnDisconnection method of the IDTExtensibility2 interface. Receives notification that the Add-in is being unloaded.</summary>
        /// <param term='disconnectMode'>Describes how the Add-in is being unloaded.</param>
        /// <param term='custom'>Array of parameters that are host application specific.</param>
        /// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />
        public void OnDisconnection(ext_DisconnectMode disconnectMode, ref Array custom)
        {
            // Unhook the ProjectContextChanged event handler.
            if (null != m_tfsExt)
            {
                m_tfsExt.ProjectContextChanged -= new EventHandler(m_tfsExt_ProjectContextChanged);
                m_tfsExt = null;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>Implements the OnAddInsUpdate method of the IDTExtensibility2 interface. Receives notification when the collection of Add-ins has changed.</summary>
        /// <param term='custom'>Array of parameters that are host application specific.</param>
        /// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />       
        public void OnAddInsUpdate(ref Array custom)
        {
        }

        /// <summary>Implements the OnStartupComplete method of the IDTExtensibility2 interface. Receives notification that the host application has completed loading.</summary>
        /// <param term='custom'>Array of parameters that are host application specific.</param>
        /// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />
        public void OnStartupComplete(ref Array custom)
        {
        }

        /// <summary>Implements the OnBeginShutdown method of the IDTExtensibility2 interface. Receives notification that the host application is being unloaded.</summary>
        /// <param term='custom'>Array of parameters that are host application specific.</param>
        /// <seealso class='IDTExtensibility2' />
        public void OnBeginShutdown(ref Array custom)
        {
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Raised by the TFS Visual Studio integration package when the active project context changes.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="sender"></param>
        /// <param name="e"></param>
        private void m_tfsExt_ProjectContextChanged(Object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                if (null != m_tfsExt.ActiveProjectContext &&
                    !String.IsNullOrEmpty(m_tfsExt.ActiveProjectContext.DomainUri))
                {
                    SwitchToTfs(TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(m_tfsExt.ActiveProjectContext.DomainUri)));
                }
                else
                {
                    SwitchToTfs(null);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
            }
        }

        private void SwitchToTfs(TfsTeamProjectCollection tfs)
        {
            if (Object.ReferenceEquals(m_tfs, tfs))
            {
                // No work to do; could be a team project switch only
                return;
            }

            if (null != m_tfs)
            {
                m_tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>().BeforeCheckinPendingChange -= new ProcessingChangeEventHandler(VersionControlServer_BeforeCheckinPendingChange);
                m_tfs = null;
            }

            if (null != tfs)
            {
                m_tfs = tfs;
                m_tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>().BeforeCheckinPendingChange += new ProcessingChangeEventHandler(VersionControlServer_BeforeCheckinPendingChange);               
            }
        }

        private void VersionControlServer_BeforeCheckinPendingChange(Object sender, ProcessingChangeEventArgs e)
        {
            if (null != e.PendingChange &&
                !String.IsNullOrEmpty(e.PendingChange.ServerItem))
            {
                MessageBox.Show("About to check in: " + e.PendingChange.ServerItem);
            }
        }
       
        private DTE2 _applicationObject;
        private AddIn _addInInstance;

        private TeamFoundationServerExt m_tfsExt;
        private TfsTeamProjectCollection m_tfs;
    }
}

Nick Kirchem, who works on the TFS web access team, recently answered a question on how email subscriptions on checkin alerts.  The question was, how do I subscribe to checkin alerts not under a particular folder?

Here’s how to do it.

bissubscribe /eventType CheckinEvent /address someone@domain.com /deliveryType EmailHtml /server http://myserver:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection "'Artifacts/Artifact[@ArtifactType=\"VersionedItem\"][not(starts-with(translate(@ServerItem, \"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\", \"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz\"), \"$/devdiv/feature/build/qa\"))]' <> null"

Let’s break it down.

• /eventType – Here we want CheckinEvent.  There are others.  Rather than list them, I’d recommend the Alerts Explorer that is part of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools.  You can use it to discover more, as each different type has different things you can filter on.
• /address – The email address to use.
• /deliveryType – We want HTML-formatted email.
• /server – Here I’ve used the URL to the default collection on a TFS 2010 server.  You’ll need to edit it to match the server and collection you need to use.
• expression – The expression is somewhat hard to read.
• The path we want to filter out is listed last, which $/devdiv/feature/build/qa in this case.  You must use lowercase for your path.
• The translate XPath function is used to normalize the casing of the server path to be all lower case.  This is important because XPath is case sensitive.
• The starts-with XPath function tests to see if the path is one we are interested in (in this case to filter out).
• The not XPath function inverts the test to see if it is not under the path we want to filter out.
• The quotation marks are escaped so that they can be inside quotation marks on the Windows command prompt.

I recommend using the Alerts Explorer power tool rather than doing this by hand.  However, in this case, the Alerts Explorer does not support this.

Nick has also written a feature for TFS 11 to allow you to edit alerts inside the product through the web interface.  An early version of it is in the TFS 11 CTP release that came out in concert with the Windows’ //build conference.  Here’s a screen shot of it.  Note that you can only see it in the UI if you enable email in the TFS Administration Console.  Since then he’s made it easier to use and made it so that you can administer other user alerts, if you are an administrator.

Related post: Adding a path filter to a CheckinEvent subscription using bissubscribe

The question came up as to how to delete a team project in the Team Foundation Service Preview.  When I first tried it, it didn’t work.  Then I realized it’s the one case where you have to explicitly specify the collection name.  It’s surprising because in hosted TFS each account has only one collection.  You cannot create multiple collections currently as you can with on-premise TFS (this will change at some point in the future).  Incidentally, you cannot delete a collection right now either.

You must have installed the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview (or newer build of VS/TE 11) to do this.  Even with the patch to support hosting, the 2010 version of tfsdeleteproject.exe will not work.

If you leave off the collection, here’s the error you will see when I try to delete the team project called Testing.

C:\project>tfsdeleteproject /collection:https://buckh-test2.tfspreview.com Testing
Team Foundation services are not available from server https://buckh-test2.tfspreview.com/.
Technical information (for administrator):
  HTTP code 404: Not Found

With DefaultCollection added to your hosting account’s URL, you will get the standard experience with tfsdeleteproject and successfully delete the team project.

C:\project>tfsdeleteproject /collection:https://buckh-test2.tfspreview.com/DefaultCollection Testing

Warning: Deleting a team project is an irrecoverable operation. All version control, work item tracking and Team Foundation build data will be destroyed from the system. The only way to recover this data is by restoring a stored backup of the databases. Are you sure you want to delete the team project and all of its data (Y/N)?y

Deleting from Build ...
Done
Deleting from Version Control ...
Done
Deleting from Work Item Tracking ...
Done
Deleting from TestManagement ...
Done
Deleting from LabManagement ...
Done
Deleting from ProjectServer ...
Done
Warning. Did not find Report Server service.
Warning. Did not find SharePoint site service.
Deleting from Team Foundation Core ...
Done

This is the error you will get when using tfsdeleteproject 2010, even with the patch for hosting access.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>tfsdeleteproject /collection:https://buckh-test2.tfspreview.com/DefaultCollection Testing2

Warning: Deleting a team project is an irrecoverable operation. All version control, work item tracking and Team Foundation build data will be destroyed from the system. The only way to recover this data is by restoring a stored backup of the databases. Are you sure you want to delete the team project and all of its data (Y/N)?y

TF200040: You cannot delete a team project with your version of Team Explorer. Contact your system administrator to determine how to upgrade your Team Explorer client to the version compatible with Team Foundation Server.

Today the .NET team is releasing a cumulative update patch.  This has all of the QFEs up until a couple of months ago rolled into one patch.  Included as part of that is a patch for WPF that improves the performance of the Windows Workflow Designer as well as a hang that a number of folks have hit.  I had a few customers try it out, and they were happy with the improvements.  I recommend this update to you if you work with the WF Designer (e.g., editing the workflow for Team Build definitions).  There are still perf issues even with this fix, and the WF Designer team has made some very good perf improvements for the next release.

You can find a complete list of the issues fixed at KB 2468871 under More Information.  There are also six features related to ASP.NET and Silverlight listed after the issues.

Here is the download page: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3556.

Enjoy!

P.S.  This is completely unrelated to the TFS cumulative update that Brian has written about here.  I recommend both.

The fine folks who write documentation for our product are woefully outnumbered.  Every month they release updates to the docs, adding new topics and enhancing existing ones.  You can find the latest set of updates described on their blog.

• Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, SQL Server
• Building the Application
• Team Explorer Everywhere
• Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Feature Pack

Have you ever tried to debug an issue in old binaries and you don’t remember which version of the source they correspond to?  Have you debugged without symbols because no one saved them?  Here’s how to make your life easier.

One of the great features in Team Foundation Server 2010 Build is the ability to have your builds automatically indexed with source server and the symbols stored in symbol server.  Ed Blankenship has posted a great write up on how to configure and use this feature from the build to debugging in Visual Studio.

Source Server and Symbol Server Support in TFS 2010

As Jim Lamb announced in June 2009, TFS 2010 introduces support for Source Server and Symbol Server as part of the default automated build process template. This is a really key feature addition but I have found that many developers ask about why it would be so important and why it would help them. Ultimately, we are starting to have more and more tools that need access to the symbol file information and the original source code that was used for compilation. For example, some of the tools that come to mind are:

• Visual Studio Debugging including the Remote Debugger
• IntelliTrace
• Visual Studio Profiler
• WinDBG

By setting up Source Server and Symbol Server support during your build process, you’ll be able to work with assemblies & executables that come from the build servers and still use tools that need information from them.

more…

[UPDATE 4/12/2011]  Ewald Hofman pointed out that I missed Cameron’s excellent debugging series posts.  In Cameron’s second post, he points out how to work around an issue with using minidumps with VS 2010 SP1.

• Debugging Series: Symbol Server
• Debugging Series: Symbols Server and Your Symbols

Check it out!

Brian Keller has release a new OData service for TFS.  He does a great job explaining it, and he also includes a video demo.

OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010

What the heck is an OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010?
I’m glad you asked. The purpose of this project is to help developers work with data from Team Foundation Server on multiple types of devices (such as smartphones and tablets) and operating systems. OData provides a great solution for this goal, since the existing Team Foundation Server 2010 object model only works for applications developed on the Windows platform. The Team Foundation Server 2010 application tier also exposes a number of web services, but these are not supported interfaces and interaction with these web services directly may have unintended side effects. OData, on the other hand, is accessible from any device and application stack which supports HTTP requests. As such, this OData service interacts with the client object model in the SDK (it does not manipulate any web services directly).

What is OData?
OData exposes a way to work with data over the web. If you’re new to OData, I suggest spending a few minutes at http://www.odata.org/ reading about this evolving standard. It uses interfaces similar to REST, so that you can programmatically consume and manipulate data from any device or application stack which supports HTTP requests. DPE has been working with several organizations (such as PayPal, Facebook, and Netflix) and product groups to enable OData where it makes sense to do so. Team Foundation Server was an obvious choice since it not only allows developers to extend TFS in new and interesting ways, but it also allows us to further showcase support for this evolving standard with the developer community at large.

more…

Enjoy!

In the year since the release of TFS 2010, we’ve seen a run of great new books coming, all by authors who really know their subject matter extremely well.  At the beginning of the year, Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew published Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, the book on MSBuild and TFS Build.

Then Mickey Gousset, Brian Keller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, and Martin Woodward brought us Professional Application Lifecycle Management.  My copy of that book came in handy when I wrote a post on using the code metrics power tool with TFS Build.  It covers the full range of the VS ALM 2010 product.

Now Professional Team Foundation Server 2010 written by Ed Blankenship, Martin Woodward, Grant Holliday, and Brian Keller is now out.  I got my copy the other day and highly recommend it.  Martin wrote a great blog post on the book, and in it he describes the differences between Professional ALM and Professional TFS.

People have asked us what’s the difference between the ALM book and the Pro TFS book.  The ALM book was deliberately written as an overview to the huge amount of functionality available in the entire Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management suite.  Though there are a couple of chapters, the Team Build one in particular, that get pretty technical – the Pro ALM book tries to keep things approachable by everyone.

The Pro TFS 2010 book is a deep dive on TFS.  We tried to make it so that you can pick up the book having never used TFS before any by the end of it not only know how to use TFS but how to administer a complex TFS instance and even use it to study for the TFS Administration exam.  I’ve learnt something from every single chapter in the Pro TFS book, but I would also hope that someone new to TFS could pick up the book and learn just enough to get going then come back for more over time.

They’ve included information on every major area of TFS and have included some coverage of the test features that integrate with TFS.  One of the things that makes the book great is that it includes some great information on features of the product you may not even know about.  For example, did you know you can use Active Directory to automatically configure version control proxies for your distributed teams (check out chapter 24)?  Want to understand your server’s health and diagnose performance issues (see chapter 21)?

Jeff Levinson’s Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010 covers the testing features of VS ALM 2010, which was a huge area of focus for us in the 2010 release.  In it he covers creating test cases, reporting, and lab management, which is a powerful and complex new feature in 2010.

In May we’ll get Professional Scrum with TFS 2010, so stay tuned for more.

Andrew Hall wrote a great post on the Code Analysis Team Blog about how to use the code analysis checkin policy with gated checkin in Team Foundation 2010 Build to reject checkins that have code analysis warnings or errors.  He shows you how to configure the rule set and set up the gated build definition to enforce the code analysis rules you’ve chosen.

Preventing check-ins to TFS that contain code analysis warnings

Recently we have received several questions regarding Visual Studio Code Analysis integration with Team Foundation Server’s check-in policy and build server, so I thought it would be helpful to clarify the behavior and expose some relatively hidden functionality.

more…

Enjoy!

In the past, we’ve turned on compression for the SOAP responses for the TFS web services.  In TFS 2010, you must do it manually.  In the future, I hope we have it turned on by default.  It’s particularly good for teams that aren’t at the same location as the TFS server.  For users on a high-speed corporate network, it’s not likely to matter.

Grant wrote a post on how to turn it on: TFS2010: How to enable compression for SOAP traffic.

Custom checkin policies and custom work item controls are great ways to take advantage of the extensibility of TFS.  You can use checkin policies to enforce certain standards on checkins (even in your builds).  Custom work item controls allow you to add controls to your work item forms that present data in particular way, access other systems, etc.  However, there’s no mechanism in Team Explorer to download and install these.

Youhana has written a post on how to use a feature in the power tools that not many folks know about.  By creating a couple of version control folders in each team project, you can have folks use the Team Members node in Team Explorer to download and install them.  This means that your users don’t need to know where to put the files on disk or the registry entries to create to make them work.  There’s not an auto-update mechanism there right now, so users will need to do this again if you subsequently update the dlls.  To get to this feature, you need to have the Team Foundation Server Power Tools installed on each machine where you want to use this feature.

Distributing custom check-in policies & WIT controls using team members

The team members component of the TFS power tools (available here) has a feature to help TFS users distribute custom check-in policies and WIT controls. Basically, the administrator would add the dlls containing the policies and components to a special folder in version control and users then can install the components using the “personal settings” dialog in team members. These are the detailed steps:

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Enjoy!

Neno’s been blogging a lot this month, and many of his posts have helpful tools associated with them.  The post below caught my eye as particularly useful.  We’ll be using HTML fields more going forward, and he has a tool to help you move your existing work items to use an HTML field for the Description.

Enriching your Work Item Descriptions by Moving them to a HTML field

In the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template (and most likely in future process templates), Microsoft is using HTML fields with rich formatting for the work item description fields.

In VS Scrum 1.0…

• Product Backlog Items and Tasks are usingMicrosoft.VSTS.Common.DescriptionHtml.
• Bugs are using Microsoft.VSTS.TCM.ReproSteps instead.

You can customize your current process template and add a new HTML description today.

more…

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, we introduced a regression into Visual Studio 2010 SP1 in the process of fixing a performance issue in the build details view that a number of customers had reported (viewing the log was really slow for larger builds). We made this change late in SP1. I apologize for the inconvenience. I want to make sure you know about that patch if you hit the problem.

The fix is available at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=34824.

KB2522890 - VS10 SP1 crashes on build details from TFS 2008 build explorer

Issue Description
Visual Studio 2010 SP1 crashes or shows the following error when attempting to view a build report on a TFS 2008 server:

"TF50316: The following name is not valid. Verify that the name does not exceed the maximum character limit, only contains valid characters, and is not a reserved name"

Additional Information about the issue resolved by this Hotfix can be found in its Knowledge Base article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2522890

Test attachment data generated by the new testing features in VS 2010 can add a large amount of data to your TFS server.  In fact, we discovered on our own “dogfood” server that test data was taking up more space than the version control data.  You can read more about it in Grant’s post here.

You can use the Test Attachment Cleaner for Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 & Test Professional 2010 to delete old test data to reduce the size.  Here’s the description from that page.

Overview:

In Visual Studio 2010, with the introduction of Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 & Visual Studio Premium/Ultimate 2010 SKUs, testers can author manual and automated Test cases, configure the different diagnostic data collectors (as part of Test Settings), associate the Test Settings with Test Plan/Suites and then execute these test cases as part of Test Runs. The execution of a Test Run (whether automated or manual) generates a bunch of diagnostic data, which may be captured either automatically by the system or manually by the tester. This diagnostic data is critical in eliminating the “no repro” bug scenarios between the testers and developers.

However, the downside of this rich diagnostic data captures is that the system/user generated diagnostic data, over a period of time, can grow at a rapid pace and start taking up database space. With Visual Studio 2010, the database administrator has little or no control over what data gets attached as part of Test Runs – i.e., there are no policy settings he can control to limit the size of the data capture OR no retention policy to determine how long to hold this data before initiating a cleanup. In such scenarios, the Admin has no mechanism to:

1. Determine which set of diagnostic captures is taking up how much space AND

2. Reclaim the space for runs which are no longer relevant from business perspective.

The “Test Attachment Cleaner” powertool fills this void by serving both the above points.

[UPDATE 8/8/11]  The TFS 2010 power tools now provide rollback in the UI as described here.

Tonight Justin and I spoke to the Minnesota Visual Studio User Group.  It was completely unscripted, and we had a great time answering questions and telling a few stories (can you name the original code names for version control, work item tracking and load testing?).  Nearly everyone in the audience was using TFS, and many folks had already moved to TFS 2010.  We covered a lot of ground, touching on parts of VS and ALM – more than just TFS.  I got to thinking as folks were asking questions what might be the one TFS 2010 feature folks in the room probably didn’t know about.  I asked how many folks knew about rollback, and there were just a couple of hands.  I’m pretty sure they were thinking of the rollback command in the tfpt.exe power tool for 2008 and 2005.

We added a full-featured rollback command to tf.exe in Team Foundation Server 2010. You can only use it from the command line, so a lot of folks don’t know about it.  We had plans to add it to the UI (the rollback command was implemented very early in the 2010 development cycle), but higher priority work prevented us from getting to it.

The 2010 rollback command is implemented on the server, handles all of the change types, and it properly rolls back merge history so that it is as if the merge never happened if you roll back a merge (you can control that via a switch if you want a different behavior).

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC>tf rollback /?
TF - Team Foundation Version Control Tool, Version 10.0.30319.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Rolls back the changes in a single or a range of changesets:
tf rollback /changeset:changesetfrom~changesetto [itemspec] [/recursive]
            [/lock:none|checkin|checkout] [/version:versionspec]
            [/keepmergehistory] [/noprompt] [/login:username,[password]]

tf rollback /toversion:versionspec itemspec [/recursive]
            [/lock:none|checkin|checkout] [/version:versionspec]
            [/keepmergehistory] [/noprompt] [/login:username,[password]]

Versionspec:
    Date/Time         D"any .Net Framework-supported format"
                      or any of the date formats of the local machine
    Changeset number  Cnnnnnn
    Label             Llabelname
    Latest version    T
    Workspace         Wworkspacename;workspaceowner

So, the next time someone checks in something accidentally (or worse!), you can roll it back easily!  We’ve done this internally a few times.  :-)

Enjoy!

[Update 3/16/11]  There is a KB article with TFS 2010 SP1 installation troubleshooting should you hit problems: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2516423.

Problem

A customer ran into this issue, and I want to post it to help anyone else who hits it.  The symptom is that you install Service Pack 1 for Team Foundation Server 2010, and it fails.

At first, we looked at the KB log file, which is an HTML file named something like KB2182621_20110314_153652021.htm (after the KB number, it’s the date and time – one log will be generated per failed attempt).  That file doesn’t contain the error unfortunately, but towards the end you will find a reference to a file with a name like {some path}\KB2182621_20110314_153652021-Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU-MSP0.txt, as highlighted in the log snippet below.  In that log file you will find the real error (search for the word error until you find something that looks like the stack pasted at the end of this post).

Wait for Item (VS10-KB2182621.msp) to be available
VS10-KB2182621.msp is now available to install
Creating new Performer for Patches item

     Entering Function: BaseMspInstallerT >::PerformAction...

     Action: Performing Install on MSP: c:\7b04dc4d154aa5031a470fad\VS10-KB2182621.msp targetting Product: Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU...

        Successfully called MsiEnableLog with log file set to C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Temp\KB2182621_20110314_153652021-Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU-MSP0.txt
        Log File C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Temp\KB2182621_20110314_153652021-Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU-MSP0.txt does not yet exist but may do at Watson upload time
        about to call MsiInstallProduct with PATCH="c:\7b04dc4d154aa5031a470fad\VS10-KB2182621.msp" on product {BD8885BD-CFE2-3E43-99BC-33EC4E109EF5}(C:\WINDOWS\Installer\90c8f.msi) to install patches.
        Patch (c:\7b04dc4d154aa5031a470fad\VS10-KB2182621.msp) Install failed on product (Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU). Msi Log: 
        MSI returned 0x643

Entering Function: MspInstallerT >::Rollback...

exiting function/method

Here we found the following lines.  Bryan and Mahmoud found that the 0x80005000 error occurs when trying to access IIS through ADSI and IIS6 compat mode is not installed.  This was indeed the problem!

CAQuietExec: Exception Message: Unknown error (0x80005000) (type COMException)

CAQuietExec: Exception Stack Trace: at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)

Solution

Make sure IIS 6 Management Compatibility is turned on (Start –> Control Panel –> Programs –> Turn Windows Features On or Off)

Make sure the IIS Admin Service is running (Start –> Run… services.msc)

Here is the full error from the log to help anyone search for parts of it through a search engine.

CAQuietExec:   Invoking operation Stop on application pool: Microsoft Team Foundation Server Application Pool
CAQuietExec:   Exception while invoking operation Stop on application pool Microsoft Team Foundation Server Application Pool
CAQuietExec:  
CAQuietExec:  Exception Message: Unknown error (0x80005000) (type COMException)
CAQuietExec: 
CAQuietExec:  Exception Stack Trace:    at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.get_NativeObject()
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Invoke(String methodName, Object args)
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.ApplicationPoolHelper.InvokeOperationOnApplicationPool(String appPoolName, String operation)
CAQuietExec: 
CAQuietExec:  Failed executing the command quiesce: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.ConfigurationException: An error occurred while invoking operation Stop on application pool Microsoft Team Foundation Server Application Pool. Please see the log file for additional details. ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Unknown error (0x80005000)
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.get_NativeObject()
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Invoke(String methodName, Object args)
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.ApplicationPoolHelper.InvokeOperationOnApplicationPool(String appPoolName, String operation)
CAQuietExec:     --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.ApplicationPoolHelper.InvokeOperationOnApplicationPool(String appPoolName, String operation)
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.ApplicationPoolHelper.StopApplicationPool(ApplicationPoolType type, Boolean waitForWorkerProcessTermination)
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.ServiceControl.TfsServiceControl.QuiesceApplicationTier()
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.ServiceControl.TfsServiceControl.Quiesce(IEnumerable`1 featureList)
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.ServiceControl.TfsServiceControl.Main(String args)
CAQuietExec:  > Inner Exception:
CAQuietExec:  System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80005000): Unknown error (0x80005000)
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.get_NativeObject()
CAQuietExec:     at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Invoke(String methodName, Object args)
CAQuietExec:     at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.ApplicationPoolHelper.InvokeOperationOnApplicationPool(String appPoolName, String operation)

If you are responsible for work with your team’s build system, you will definitely want to buy a copy of Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (Second Edition).  Both of the authors now work for Microsoft.  William Bartholomew is part of the central engineering team and has been building the infrastructure to allow Team Foundation Build to be used as the build system for all of the developer division.  You can follow that progress and find more info on team build on his blog.  Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi works on the web platform team, and he writes a lot about building web projects on his blog.

This second edition contains extensive coverage of build in Team Foundation Server 2010, which introduced Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as the new build process orchestration mechanism.  WF provides a fantastic platform for your build process needs, and this book helps you get over the learning curve and become productive faster.

I highly recommend it, and the reviews on Amazon are further testimony to how valuable this book is.

Vishal Joshi, lead program manager for web platform tools, has a great blog covering using various project types with Team Foundation Build.  Here’s a selection of his posts on using team build, which I highly recommend if you are working with web projects.

• Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness

• Web Packaging: Creating web packages using MSBuild

• Web Deployment Painkillers: VS 2010 & MS Deploy

• Web Application Project Vs Web Site

Question: Can a TFS 2010 Team Project Collection (TPC) on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise be down converted to SQL Server Standard 2008 edition?

Answer: This is covered in the 2010 Upgrade guide post.

The script is: exec prc_EnablePrefixCompression @online = 0, @disable = 1

(answer provided by Ed Holloway)