I’m very pleased to announce that our new book Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 is now available! It’s an update to the 2010 edition that reflects all the great new features and changes introduced in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012....

This is a brand new feature in TFS 2012 that hasn’t really been documented or talked about yet. If you’re a TFS administrator and you browse to this address on your server, you will see a new web-based administration interface for some things inside of...

Since TFS 2010, it has been possible to have multiple Application Tier servers configured in a load-balanced configuration. If you use something like a F5 BIG-IP LTM device, then the default Idle Timeout settings for the TCP Profile can cause problems...

Team Foundation Server has allowed you to modify your Work Item Type Definitions since the first version of TFS. (Side note: this is not the case with the Team Foundation Service , but the team hopes to enable that at some point in the future. At the...

Team Foundation Server allows you to modify the Work Item Type definitions. You can use a graphical interface like the Process Editor included in the Team Foundation Server Power Tool, or you can edit the raw XML. For making changes across many work item...

This is a question that I get occasionally, and it’s covered in more detail in the Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 book that I wrote. Team Foundation Server has a Job Agent built in. It’s implemented as a Windows Service that runs...

So, you've just unpacked your brand new Microsoft Surface with Windows RT. What now? Where do you start? Here's my list of things to do and hopefully it helps you. Step 1 – Choose the right Microsoft account / Windows Live ID "Microsoft account"...

The Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server Monitoring Management Pack for monitoring TFS with System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 or 2012 is now available. You can download it here . The Team Foundation Server 2012 Monitoring Management Pack...

The Visual Studio Updates are a new mechanism that the team is using to provide ongoing value through the year to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server customers. For more information on the updates, see:  Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Visual Studio...

I am pleased to announce that the TFS Administration Tool 2.2 has been released. This release works against Team Foundation Server 2012 and installs on a machine with Team Explorer 2012 . You no longer need to install Team Explorer 2010 to use this tool...

As a Premier Field Engineer , we are constantly skilling up and getting accredited to deliver our proactive support offerings. All of these offerings are in the latest Microsoft Services Premier Support Catalogue for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) ....

Recently I was invited to speak at TechEd 2012 Australia on my experience with building an Internet-scale service on Windows Azure. Rather than focus on the coding aspects which are documented quite comprehensively on MSDN , I focused on the operational...

I was on-site with a customer last week performing a Team Foundation Server Health Check (TFSHC) . While I was there, I noticed that their SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 R2 SP1 instance had been crashing. So, I did what any good PFE would do and grabbed...

When I was running the internal Team Foundation Servers (TFS) at Microsoft, we sometimes encountered issues that could only be understood by analysing a memory dump. This was especially true on the Pioneer and Dogfood servers that were running pre-Beta...

(I try to keep this a purely technical/work blog and it’s rare that I post personal things up here, but this is too good not to share). The 1st of July is the end of the Financial Year (in Australia, at least) and I find that I have better success with...

This is a fairly obscure Team Foundation Server (TFS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) configuration, but if you find yourself in this situation, it is another option for making the TFS Analysis Services cube available to your users. I would be...

To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of or understood the ‘PFE’ role at Microsoft until I moved away from Redmond and into the subsidiary. That was one of the traps of being in the product team on campus – by not being on a customer site every day...

You may have noticed that my blog has been a little void of new content lately. The good news is that I'm back with a bunch of new things to talk about. First of all, for those of you who don't know, my family and I relocated back to my hometown of Canberra...

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...

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...

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...