Folks at Microsoft have great integrity. That is, they do what they say they are going to do and let you know early if they can’t follow through with their commitment. I hope you have the same experience at your company. Maybe we are just lucky...

I wanted to pass on a book that I’ll be wrapping up shortly.  I’m getting some good ideas that may support creating repeatable processes to around delivering complex software projects.  Here is part of the introduction as a teaser… Here, then...

It’s great to see more TFS users use a tool they know, Excel, in conjunction with a tool they may not know so well, Analysis Services to answer questions about their software project.  The default TFS reports provide a great first level of detail...

If you are using TFS 2008 for work item tracking be sure to get most out of the tool by relating work items.  Depending on the process template you are using the work item types may be different.  In general terms consider linking your requirement...

I was lucky enough to have some I’d been a part of captured in a case study.  The engagement was focused on Application Lifecycle Management improvements focused on people, process and tools (TFS). The study is available at http://www.microsoft.com...

  It’s great to see the latest version of Team Foundation Server branching guide just passed 30,000 downloads.  Even if you are using another source control system I think you will find plenty of the information in the guide is version control...

I recently had to create an area tree, in a TFS project, with  large number (500+) of nodes.  I was not looking forward to doing this manually.  I had the area tree that I needed to create in a comma delimited (CSV) file so I looked around...

My colleague, Ian Ceicys ( http://blogs.msdn.com/iceicys/ ) just pointed me to a great book on Windows Server Hyper-V.  I’ve been a been late ramping up on this server role so I’m excited to get caught up.  I’m reading this now Windows Server...

When switching between TFS servers (i.e. different servers not TFS projects) there can be data that is cached between projects on the 2 servers leading to some confusion in the Team Explorer UI that makes is appear you have not really changes servers...

If you are attending the Microsoft technical readiness (TechReady) conference this week in Seattle please drop by one of my sessions below.  I’ll be speaking with Mario Rodriguez, from the Visual Studio team, about source code branch requirements...

Determining how long it will take to migrate source and revision history is usually tricky for me to answer accurately.  Depending on the source and destination source control systems there may be some scripts or tools to help automate the task but...

If you use any sort of source control system you will find this TFS Branching Guide available at http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII useful.  There is some Team Foundation Server specific content and labs but the main branching guide is source...

Here are some steps you may want to take to around planning downtime for your Team Foundation Server h/w. Proxy – can be rebooted at any time.  Users will pass through to the App Tier as long as the proxy is offline. Build – Mark the build agents...

"Visual Studio 2010 == happiness" is from one of the VSTS 2010 talks today. I expected more buzz around Windows Azure but talking to folks in the lounge, at lunch and over coffee there is huge interest in some of the new features in VSTS 2010 especially...

I jumpstarted my PDC experience this year by attending a pre-conference talk on Agile Perspective; Industry and Microsoft . I was surprised to see such strong turn out on a Sunday. There appeared to be about 200 people at the talk. Many times I need to...

I'm in Los Angeles this week to attend the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). My personal PDC goal is to focus on how partners supplement our Microsoft ALM offerings. I'm especially interested in seeing complimentary and competitive offerings...

Below is a branch plan that I've used before that enables servicing a released product with hot fixes, a cumulative service pack (SP) and enables next version work in main and the development branches. This is also simplified version on the branch plan...

There are many posts and deep thoughts on source code branching but little advice on how deep you should go into putting your build dependencies under source control. Since I've not seen any general guidance on managing build dependencies I'll offer the...

This post applies mostly to Team Build 2005 but users of later versions of TFS may find this useful as well. If you are working with Team Foundation Server 2005 you will eventually hit a build break or have a check in fail because the full path(e.g...