Team Foundation Server 2010 was released in April 2010. Since then, there have been a number of important Service Packs, Cumulative Updates and hotfixes that have been made available based upon internal usage at Microsoft and customer feedback via the...

Jason Prickett has a blog post called Creating Fake Builds in TFS Build 2010 . It includes code for creating a dummy build service host, build controller, build definition and then a build result ( IBuildDetail ). One thing that isn’t shown is how to...

Over the last few years, I've occasionally had a need for an empty or minimal process template. For example: You are setting up a sync with the TFS Integration Tools and you want to do a "context sync" (i.e. let the tool copy the Work Item Types...

IntelliTrace is a very useful tool for diagnosing applications on the Windows Azure platform. It is especially invaluable for diagnosing problems that occur during the startup of your roles. You might have seen these sorts of problems when you do a deployment...

[Update: 1 Nov 2011] There is an update available for TFS 2010 SP1 that prevents many of the large test attachments being stored in the database in the first place. You can download it from KB2608743 or read more about it on Annuthra's blog post: Reduce...

Every command that a user executes in TFS is logged to the database. This is very useful for investigating performance issues and other things. I’ve blogged before about how to query this table for TFS2008. Those same queries work for TFS2010 as well...

With the recent reorganization of SPLA prices for Team Foundation Server, there’s been some new offerings in the Hosted TFS space. I’ve blogged about other TFS hosting services in the past and there’s a list of the companies that provide...

Recently I started seeing this error on our internal TFS SharePoint sites.  These sites use the Excel Dashboards and if I opened more than a few sites at a time, I would start getting the following popup error: Unexpected callback response! Error...

This blog post describes how to interpret the Data Warehouse & Cube status reports included in the Administrative Report Pack for TFS2010 . Should I expect some processing jobs to fail? Why might most processing jobs fail? Why might many...

One of the key components of TFS is the Data Warehouse, which is made up of a relational database and an Analysis Services cube . In general, people don’t have a problem with the performance or operation of our Data Warehouse. However there were...

To prepare for the DevDiv TFS2010 upgrade we had to copy 8TB of SQL backups about 100 miles across a WAN link so that we could restore it on our test system.  The link speed was reasonably good and the latency fairly low (5ms), but when you’re dealing...

When you upgrade from Team Foundation Server 2008 to 2010, one of the things you need to check is the compatibility of the tools that people rely on and use the server with. Without careful preparation this can have a significant impact on your user's...

In John Socha-Leialoha's blog post on Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2008 Reports to 2010, Part I , there is a hidden gem: For the first time, writing reports against the warehouse using SQL is officially supported . As a rule of thumb, you’ll generally...

When we upgraded our internal servers to TFS2010, some of our remote users noticed that HTTP compression was used for some traffic, but not all. HTTP compression was enabled for file downloads from source control and for web access pages but we weren...

Problem The DevDiv mainline contains over 200GB of content and more than 1.8 million files. Any version control operations that had to deal with this amount of content would occasionally run into two problems: If the number of pending changes is more...

Back in April, the week before the VS2010 worldwide launch we successfully upgraded the server to TFS2010 RTM. Because this is such a large server and almost 4,000 people in the division depend on it for their day-to-day work, it took a couple of months...

Team Foundation Server 2010 has the great new Administration Console, however one of the shortcomings of it is that you have to run it on the TFS Application Tier itself. The team wants to have a tool that allows remote server administration, however...

The new TFS Administration Console will show you very basic information about warehouse & cube processing. However, it doesn’t show you anything about the queued & executing jobs. These are both gaps that I hope we address in the shipping...

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to invoke the Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Web Services remotely using Windows PowerShell 2.0. There are some TFS administrative functions that can only be performed remotely using the TFS ASMX web services...

Both TFS2008 and TFS2010 allow users to create subscriptions to events. These can be Work Item events, CheckIn events and others. They are created via the ‘Project Alerts’ option in Team Explorer or Web Access, or the ‘Alerts’ feature in the Team Foundation...

Update: You should read this post in conjunction with Taylor's blog post: Introducing the TfsConnection, TfsConfigurationServer and TfsTeamProjectCollection Classes Based on feedback that we received both internally and externally we decided to make...

When the Forward Compatibility GDR for Visual Studio 2008 shipped, a change was made to the Team Foundation Server 2010 code that blocks incompatible clients. That means that after TFS2010 beta2, clients that don’t have a forward-compatible patch installed...

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 include an updated version of Robocopy that includes a multi-threaded copy feature. /MT [:n] :: Do multi-threaded copies with n threads (default 8). I’ve been using this for a while now and I’ve been seeing excellent...

In the TFS 2010 release, if you have the Enterprise features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) configured (i.e. Single Sign-On and Excel Services), then you can make TFS Excel Reports available to your users via a web site.  This is very...

( See this summary on the VSTS Pioneer dogfood server and all the other posts .) Having an adequate backup strategy for your Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server is a very important part of any deployment. I’ll share with you how we are...