Buck Hodges

Team Foundation Server 2012.2 (aka Update 2) now available

Buck Hodges — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:41:14 GMT

Today we released the second update for TFS 2012 (TFS, TFS Express). You will find a detailed list of features in this blog post. You need to install the one that matches your installation – full or express. You do not need to uninstall TFS 2012 RTM or TFS 2012 Update 1. Installing TFS 2012.2 will take care of uninstalling your previous TFS 2012 installation and then installing the new version. You also do not need to detach collections or anything else special. As always, you should make a backup of your server prior to upgrade (you do make and test backups regularly, right?).

In this update, we preserve most of the configuration settings. This was a common complaint in the first update. We have a few more settings to preserve, most notably build machine settings, that we will address in the third update.

The one feature I want to highlight is the compatibility with TFS 2010 build agents/controllers. I mentioned this in a previous post. This is one of those features that’s incredibly valuable but isn’t obvious – you have to know about it.

This update process is completely new for the 2012 product cycle, and we learned a lot from our mistakes with the first update. Of course, our testing was even more thorough for this release.

The biggest change we made was getting more users trying early releases of it. We did this because we realized that some of the issues we had to patch for the first update were due just to the fact that customers exercise the product in different ways, and the combinations are nearly infinite. In a regular major version cycle, we have at least one public “go live” release that is crucial to flushing out bugs. We made CTP3 “go live” for our MVPs. We made CTP4 “go live” for everyone. That helped immensely. Every issue that was reported to us we investigated and fixed.

Enjoy!

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Using VS 2012 and getting “TF206018: The items could not be…” when creating a project using Git

Buck Hodges — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:12:33 GMT

If you go to Team Foundation Service, create a new account, and then create a new team project that uses Git, you may receive the following error message when either you try to connect VS 2012 or use the “Open new instance of Visual Studio” from your project’s web page and try to add a new Visual Studio project to source control.

TF206018: The items could not be added to source control because either no team projects have been set up, or because you do not have permission to access any of the team projects in the current collection.

If you run into this situation, it is because Visual Studio 2012 does not know how to handle a team project that uses Git. The normal version control entries for the team project are not there, so when VS 2012 asks for $/<your team project>, the server sends back TF206018.

To fix this, you need to install Update 2 for Visual Studio 2012 and the Visual Studio Tools for Git, as described in the topic Create a new code project.

When the next major version of Visual Studio ships, the Git support will be built-in.

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How to see activity and job history in TFS 2012

Buck Hodges — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:32:16 GMT

With TFS 2012, we introduced a new feature in the web UI that makes it easy to look at the activity and job history on your TFS 2012 server (this feature was first introduced in 2012 RTM). Before the 2012 release, you would have had to look at things like tbl_Command directly in the database to get this information.

To see this feature, just go to http://<yourserver>/tfs/_oi if you have admin privileges.

Grant Holliday has written a great blog post, TFS2012: New tools for TFS Administrators, that walks you through the feature. One thing that I’ll call attention to is for folks not used to looking at the info in tbl_Command, you’ll need to make sure you notice the Execution Count in the web UI, which we use to record a sequence of the same calls without writing a row per call. Grant explains it in his post, but it’s easy to over look.

Also, if you are interested in what jobs run and when, check out TFS2012: What are all the different Jobs built-in to TFS?

Here are a couple of screenshots to whet your appetite.

Enjoy!

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Team Foundation Server 2012 Update 2 supports 2010 Build Agents and Controllers

Buck Hodges — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:20:37 GMT

One of the changes we made in TFS 2012 for Update 2 was to support TFS 2010 build agents and controllers. This provides several major benefits. The first is the obvious one of not having to upgrade your build agents and controllers when you upgrade your server to 2012. The second is that you don’t have to alter your custom build WF activities to be built with 2012. The third is that you will still be able to use Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to run build agents and controllers – OSes that are not supported with the TFS 2012 release. This feature is available in the currently released CTP 4 of Update 2, and the final version of Update 2 will be available shortly.

Martin Hinshelwood, a Microsoft MVP, has written an extensive blog post about this feature.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 supports 2010 Build Servers

Did you know that Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 supports 2010 Build Servers? Being able to connect TF Build 2010 Controllers to TFS 2012 is opening up upgrade paths for customers that are currently blocked from upgrading to TFS 2012.

more…

Enjoy!

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OData Service for TFS v2

Buck Hodges — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:42:00 GMT

Brian Keller has released a beta of the second version of his OData service. We are also working to bring it to TF Service, so stay tuned. Check out the beta and give him feedback!

OData Service for Team Foundation Server v2

Today we are releasing the beta of the OData Service for Team Foundation Server v2 along with a sample Windows Store application

The purpose of this service is to help developers work with data from Team Foundation Server on multiple device types (such as smartphones and tablets) and operating systems. OData provides a great solution for this goal, and has been embraced by numerous developers for building great device-specific applications. OData is accessible from any device and application stack which supports HTTP requests.

more…

New build of git-tf required for use with Team Foundation Service

Buck Hodges — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:59:00 GMT

Yesterday’s update of Team Foundation Service requires a new build of git-tf, which is now available for download. Using a version of git-tf prior to the update will result in repeated prompts for your password but will never succeed in authenticating.

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How to connect to TF Service without a prompt for LiveID credentials

Buck Hodges — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:09:00 GMT

Normally when you connect to the Team Foundation Service you are presented with a web page to log in with your Microsoft Account (aka LiveID). When you log in you can choose to have it remember you and you won’t have to enter your Microsoft Account credentials again (unless you don’t log in again for a long time, and then you’ll be prompted again).

That’s great for humans, but what about an application or another web service that wants to connect? For that the code will need to use “alternate credentials," which you must enable on your account. This is the same setting used to enable basic authentication for git-tf. Then we can write some code to connect to the service with those credentials.

Longer term, we will have OAuth support available as well, but that’s not ready yet.

Enabling Alternate Credentials

You’ll need to first to turn on this feature. First, visit your account or project in a browser, click on your name in the upper right, and then click My Profile.

On the User Profile dialog, click on the Credentials tab.

Now provide a password and save the changes.

Using Alternate Credentials in code

Before going further, you’ll need to make sure that you have Update 1 for Visual Studio 2012 or newer installed. That update includes enhancements to the TFS client object model to support alternate credentials.

The easiest way to get the latest update is either via clicking on the “toast” notification that pops up from the Windows taskbar or in VS going to Tools –> Extensions and Updates…, clicking on Updates followed by Product Updates and installing the latest update. Alternatively, you can download it here.

You can verify that you have Update 1 (or newer) installed in VS using Help –> About Microsoft Visual Studio.

Now that we have the credentials turned on, we’ll now use them from a simple console app.

After creating a new console app, add a reference to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll, which you will find under v2.0 in ReferenceAssemblies. The client object model for TFS is almost entirely built with .NET 3.5 (CLR 2.0) in order to support running the TFS web parts in SharePoint.

Here’s the code.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            NetworkCredential netCred = new NetworkCredential(
                "someone@yahoo.com",
                "password");
            BasicAuthCredential basicCred = new BasicAuthCredential(netCred);
            TfsClientCredentials tfsCred = new TfsClientCredentials(basicCred);
            tfsCred.AllowInteractive = false;

            TfsTeamProjectCollection tpc = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(
                new Uri("https://YourAcct.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection"),
                tfsCred);

            tpc.Authenticate();

            Console.WriteLine(tpc.InstanceId);
        }
    }
}

I’ve added two using statements, one for System.Net to pull in NetworkCredential and one for Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client for the TFS classes we’ll need.

The first thing we construct is a standard NetworkCredential object with the username (the email address that you use for your Microsoft Account) and the password that you created for alternate credentials. On the TfsClientCredentials object, we set AllowInteractive to false to prevent a prompt dialog being shown if the credentials are invalid.

In constructing the TfsTeamProjectCollection, we must specify the URL to the collection and the credentials. Note that all connections to accounts in TF Service require https. Currently, there is only one collection per account in TF Service, so it is always DefaultCollection.

Finally, we call Authenticate() to verify that we have supplied the correct credentials and test that it is working by printing the unique InstanceId of the collection.

Now the rest of the TFS client object model is available for use with the TF Service from applications that cannot prompt for credentials.

Enjoy!

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Bing desktop–set your background to the Bing image of the day

Buck Hodges — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:01:36 GMT

Okay, so this has nothing to do with ALM, but I really like the Bing desktop app for one feature: It sets the desktop background to the Bing image of the day. I used to run this app on Win7 and had missed it since moving to Win8 (I love Win8 and have it running on all my machines). Before the recent update, installing it on Win8 would result in a message telling you to upgrade to Win7. That’s a good reminder to be careful about what you do with version checks in your code.

After downloading it, I drag it to the top of the screen and change the option to have it only show when I click on it (first option under settings) so that it doesn’t drop down when my mouse moves across the top of the screen.

Of course my favorite use of the app itself is to find out more about the image by hovering over the “i" button (clicking on it will let you pick a different Bing image). Yes, I do use Bing as my default search engine these days, so I could find this info in the browser as well, but it’s more convenient.

Enjoy!

Extending Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2012

Buck Hodges — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 03:10:29 GMT

Today we posted information on how to extend the Team Explorer window in Visual Studio 2012. Check it out!

Extending Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2012

Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2012 offers multiple options for extending the user experience. This sample demonstrates several of the extensibility points by adding a new Team Explorer page as well as by placing a new section onto the Pending Changes page.

Introduction

Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2012 offers multiple options for extending the user experience. This sample demonstrates several of the extensibility points by:

Adding a new "Recent Changes" Team Explorer page with two sections.
Adding a new "Selected File Info" section to the built-in Pending Changes page.
Adding a "Recent Changes" navigation link under the Pending Changes navigation item.

more…

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TFS 2012 Update 1: Permissions lost on attaching a collection

Buck Hodges — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 03:03:15 GMT

I just posted on the ALM blog about this issue.