Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team

VSTS is dead, long live VisualStudioUK - renaming and moving this blog

gdavi — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:39:00 GMT

We’ve decided that this blog finally needs to be renamed as the VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) designation has long since gone now. The new blog is therefore called VisualStudioUK:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudiouk/

and if you want to change your feed reader then the RSS feed is:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudiouk/rss.aspx

This will be the last post that we’ll put here, and I’ll move the Agile post series (and add in some new sections of that series) to the new blog.

we've also changed our Twitter account to @VisualStudioUK

Many thanks,

Giles

EVENT: Implementing the Secure Development Lifecycle in your ALM Process

rerwin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:31:00 GMT

One of our ALM partners, Black Marble is running a free event on implementing the Microsoft SDL process this Thursday (26th Jan) at the Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford

Security should be at the forefront of minds when developing Enterprise-grade solutions, however, it rarely is. This session will look at how implementing Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) into your development process can improve quality, reliability and long-term maintainability

So, if you’re in the area, register here

Rich

Testfest 2012, sponsored by Visual Studio

gdavi — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:43:01 GMT

Some exciting news about a brand new testing event that we are sponsoring. To quote from the Testfest website:

“Testfest is a new and exciting event, bringing testing and QA communities of the ‘traditional commercial’ teams and the game industry teams together to learn from each other and network into one big community. Testfest will take place on the 22nd of February 2012 at the Brighton Metropole hotel. See you there!”

So; if this sounds interesting hopefully we’ll see you in Brighton on the 22nd Feb.

Cheers,
Giles

An introduction to Agile development with Team Foundation Server: TFS Support for Agile practices

gdavi — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:01:50 GMT

TFS support for Agile practices
Tailoring TFS to support your Agile process with process templates
Iteration planning
Information radiators
But I’m not a .NET developer
Agile support in TFS 11

A topic that comes up reasonably often is how Team Foundation Server supports Agile development. This series of posts provides my response to that query. This is the first in the series and I’ll update the list of topics over time as there are some other posts I intend to add, as well as linking to published topics. Unless otherwise mentioned all references are to Team Foundation Server 2010 – i.e. the current release, although I will run through what’s coming in the next version in a later post.

Agile practices

I won’t summarise what, when, how and why Agile, as there are plenty of great resources covering that already. I want to start by explaining how TFS supports the key Agile practices. For now this won’t be related to a specific process, such as Scrum, but kept at a generic level. Kent Beck wrote a whitepaper called Tools for Agility and I want to outline how TFS supports the the Agile practices in the paper. I’ll quote from the paper:

“The Agile Manifesto says, “We value processes and tools, but we value individuals and interactions more.” …

This is the “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more” from the Agile Manifesto.

“Some have taken it to mean … that the agile development community is populated by neo-Luddites tossing tool CDs onto bonfires and scratching project plans on cave walls with the burnt ends of sticks.”

I really empathise with this, I’ve seen teams adopting Agile that throw away all tools and that believe post-it notes will solve all problems.

“I appreciate the opportunity to counteract this impression, to make the case for the appropriate use of tools (and processes) in agile development, and to look forward to the evolution of software development tools.”

This is the key to me; there are aspects of Agile that require, and I’ll emphasise require, the appropriate use of tools. It’s not a question of whether to use a tool for these areas but rather which tool. In the paper, Kent draws a (stylised) map between practices and tools:

Given that the tools are required in the given areas to support the high-level practices, I want to examine how TFS supports each of the tooling areas highlighted in this diagram.

Configuration Management

Agile teams will be rapidly iterating code and releases, requiring rock solid source code control support. At the infrastructure level this means you need high performance and scalability, including support for distributed teams, if required. TFS stores all data, including source code, in SQL Server and this provides the ability to scale from running full TFS on a laptop (e.g. my laptop) to supporting a distributed team of thousands with suitable hardware and TFS architecture (e.g. the Microsoft Developer Division of about 3,800 people around the globe).

Some specific features that will help support Agile teams:

Folder versioning. Rapid refactoring often involves changing not just the code but also it’s structure. TFS Folder versioning supports this.
Branching. Within an iteration/sprint each individual/pair/feature crew might want their own branch or branches in order to support parallel development across the team. TFS branching helps to support this and, importantly, to track what’s happening with branch visualisation and timeline tracking. Branches are now first class citizens in TFS 2010 and as such have fine grained permissions and capabilities.
Shelving. This TFS feature allows a developer to “park” code in a sand boxed area on the TFS server such that it is safe, but won’t effect anyone else’s code or any builds. This can help with safely sharing code, including code reviews.
Annotation. In a rapidly changing codebase annotation allows you to overlay who did what and when into the source code itself. This can help quickly identify exactly what lines of code were changed, by who, and for what reason, in a specific build.
Check-In Policies. Rapid code changes and check-ins shouldn’t mean that code quality suffers. TFS check-in policies allow you to define a quality gate to ensure that all code reaches a certain quality before it reaches the repository. For example, specific unit tests have been run and passed and code has been associated with one or more user stories or tasks.
Change Sets. Maintaining the context of a check-in becomes even more important with rapid, frequent check-ins. Why did that code get checked in? A change set identifies which files were checked in and what user stories or tasks were associated with the check-in. To be able to go back and understand why changes were made (e.g. these files were checked in to fix bug 23) can save considerable time and effort at a later point in the project.
TFS Proxy Server. Allows a remote team to get versions of the code and checkout from a local cache, rather than having to traverse a WAN to the central TFS server.

Continuous Build

TFS includes an automated build engine. This provides built-in support for scheduled builds, such as nightly or weekly builds, as well as continuous integration. This link provides a summary of Martin Fowler’s practices that constitute continuous integration and TFS supports all of these practices through capabilities such as:

Support for multiple build machines. TFS 2010 introduced a build controller, which controls one or more build agents. This allows for a build farm (one or more build machines) to distribute load and help deliver rapid releases.
Gated check-in. This new build trigger takes the pending changes and runs the build in a shelveset on TFS. Only if the build is successful do the pending changes get checked in. Otherwise, the failed build stays in the shelveset and the submitting user is warned. This mechanism helps drive quality code check-ins and reduce the risk of breaking the (integration) build. Gated check-in also reduces the need for check-in policies to be separately configured, reducing the maintenance effort.
Build logs.Why did this build get triggered? Who by? What was built? What tests were run? What user stories, tasks and bugs were addressed in the build? Where do I get the output of the build? Is it ready for testing? All of these queries and more are succinctly answered in the generated build log.
Build notification. Having continuous builds in place is of little value unless the development team takes broken builds seriously. This is primarily a cultural change for teams adopting Agile but the cornerstone is having clear visibility of the builds so that failed builds are identified quickly. TFS 2010 provides a build notification tool as standard, email alerts can also be configured and there a number of third party integrations that use the TFS API to increase visibility of builds, such as a TFS build screen saver, Brian the build bunny and Black Marble’s Phone Explorer.
Lab Management. TFS 2010 introduced Lab Management, which introduces support for virtual test environments. The combination of TFS automated builds and Lab Management means that a build can not only get the source code, label it, compile it and run unit tests on it, but also spin up a virtual test environment, deploy the build across one or more test machines in the test environment and then run automated tests before tearing down the environment. This is less likely to be configured for continuous builds (because of the time required) but does allow scheduled builds to run through an automated deploy and test cycle, helping to functionally test much closer to the code being available.

Unit Test & Refactoring

I’ve combined these two practices as they are often two sides of the same coin. Unit testing and refactoring are supported at two levels; in the editor, e.g. Visual Studio, and in the repository, i.e. TFS. Visual Studio provides unit testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) support as well as other tools to help increase code quality such as code coverage, code metrics, test impact analysis and static code analysis, together with architectural tools such as code visualisation and architectural dependency checking. These all support iterative development of code by helping confirm the quality of that code as quickly as possible.

TFS supports these primarily by providing mechanisms to automate the use of these tools in a controlled way to either ensure quality prior to check-in with check-in policies or as part of a build as discussed in the section above. Either way the intent is to discover problems as fast as possible, before the problem becomes more complex, difficult and expensive to fix.

Transparency

Software development teams need to report on their progress. Reporting involves data collection (“have you finished that task?”) and reporting (aggregating, analysing , extrapolating etc.). TFS allows you to minimise data collection by automatically collecting metrics from everyday activities. For example, marking a bug as closed generates a metric without the individual having to explicitly update any other system or tell anyone. All of these metrics are then pushed into SQL Server Analysis Services to refresh the reporting cube. All of the supplied reports then have updated data and most of these reports are by default displayed in one of the TFS project’s SharePoint dashboards. This means that information about the progress of the project is collected automatically, displayed automatically and made available to the extended team to view and understand what and how the team is doing. This provides a mechanism for open and transparent reporting that allows the tooling to do the grunt work. As Kent Beck states in his paper:

“A transparent team can more cheaply and effectively coordinate their efforts towards shared goals. Acting transparently sends a signal to others that they can trust you. Trust, when realized, reduces the friction of development as people focus more on what they are accomplishing together and less on avoiding blame.”

There are specific reports that support Agile processes, such as velocity and burn down which I’ll cover in a subsequent post, but the key here is that regardless of the report contents, TFS provides a mean to support transparency in projects.

Summary

I hope this is a useful summary of how TFS supports the key Agile practices. In the next post we’ll take a deeper dive into TFS support for specific Agile processes, in particular Scrum.

Cheers,
Giles

ALM Research Project

gdavi — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:40:49 GMT

I met Rob Myers at an event recently and he would like to get some anonymous information on ALM for his MSc research project. If you can spare a few minutes to complete the survey he’d be very grateful:

“I am working on a research project as part of an MSc with the Open University in the UK. I am looking at ALM and ALM tools

Please help by completing this brief on-line questionnaire: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HW3MFN5

The survey is quite anonymous and the data collected will be used for no purpose other than academic research. Thank you very much for your time if you are able to help.”

Cheers,
Giles

ALM On-line Assessment Tool launched

gdavi — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:22:47 GMT

We’ve just launched a new on-line tool to help provide feedback and inputs into your Application Lifecycle Management strategy and adoption. The tool will take you through the different areas of ALM and provide a report as a summary. There’s no need to complete it all in one sitting, you can log back in and do it at your leisure, and you can also delegate sections to other people, if appropriate.

When you have completed the assessment you will have the option to be connected with expert partners, Microsoft events and resources that will help you to progress your ALM practices.

It would be great to get some feedback on how you found the tool including usability and content.

ALM Assessment

Cheers,

Giles

GoingNative 2012 Conference

gdavi — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:14:55 GMT

GoingNative 2012 is a 48 hour technical event for C++ developers.

Distinguished speakers include the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, C++ Standards Committee Chair, Herb Sutter, C++ template and big compute master, Andrei Alexandrescu, STL master Stephan T. Lavavej, and more!

The agenda will be released over the next month or so.

Either attend the conference in Redmond on 2nd and 3rd Feb 2012, or watch the on-demand streamed content 24hrs later.

Cheers,
Giles

Fixing the TFS SharePoint integration after a password change

gdavi — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:24:46 GMT

I run TFS 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on my laptop so that I can demonstrate TFS without needing to be attached to a network (when on a customer site for example). My laptop is (rightly) subject to the corporate management policies so I need to change my password regularly and when I do so, because I use my account for a lot of the services, the integration between TFS and SharePoint needs updating.

Should you find yourself in the same, hopefully quite rare, position, then I’ve set out the steps you can take to fix this.

Symptoms

Once you update your password, then you will probably see the following error (Access was denied by the external data source) in the SharePoint dashboards:

If you click OK then there is a report shown, but the dates will be wrong (showing 2010):

Resolution

The first step is to update the password in SharePoint Central Administration. In the main page, select Manage service applications

Then select the Secure Store Service (the application, not the proxy)

Now update the credentials for the TFS Target Application ID.

If you have more than one ID and you’re not sure which one to update then you can confirm the name in the TFS Administration Console. In the Extensions for SharePoint Products section, select Modify access and check the name of the Enterprise Application Definition:

Now update the credentials (same user name, new password):

The final step is to update the password used for Reporting Services in the TFS Administration Console:

This will then update all the Reporting Services data sources:

Result

If you now open up the SharePoint Portal you should now not get an error and the data displayed will be up to date:

Cheers,
Giles

Bag yourself an Xbox360 by writing Windows Phone 7 apps

rerwin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:53:30 GMT

Got an idea for an awesome WP7 application? Well, get writing it before the end January 2012 and you can earn points (and we all know that points make prizes) in addition to the riches your app could generate in the marketplace.

More details from our good buddy, Paul

And of course you can get access to all the developer tools you need for free .

If you need somewhere to version control your code and help manage your project then have a look at the fantastic Team Foundation Service Preview

Need some help?

Then grab a free eBook here

or watch some videos on Channel 9 here

And of finally, go and treat yourself to a new Nokia Lumia for Christmas

Rich

Introducing the Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management Assessment

rerwin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:41:55 GMT

Microsoft UK have just launched the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Assessment which is designed to quickly identify how an organisation approaches software development from requirements to release. Based on your answers, the assessment will suggest simple but effective improvements that can be made to the way you develop software and offer best practice resources.

The assessment has been developed in conjunction with domain experts (Microsoft Gold ALM Partners Black Marble & nFocus) to consider your current process from start to finish. The online portal allows you to complete the assessment in your own time, delegate question areas to the relevant experts within your organisation and produces a printable report of the results.

You can sign up and complete the free ALM Assessment here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/alm/assessment

Deploy your cloud applications to Windows Azure from TFS Automated Build

rerwin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:32:54 GMT

The Windows Azure SDK (November 2011) has just been released and one of the updates caught my eye:

Team Build: The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 now offer MSBuild command-line support to package your application and pass in properties. Additionally, they can be installed on a lighter-weight build machine without the requirement of Visual Studio being installed.

This will make it even easier if you want to deploy your cloud projects directly to Windows Azure from a TFS automated build. Download the SDK here and get more details on the Windows Azure blog here

UK Visual Studio Team @ EuroSTAR

rerwin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:16:00 GMT

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 team will be at EuroSTAR, Europe’s premier event for software testers, in Manchester next week. Find out more about the event by visiting their site here

We have some great opportunities to get expert support on your testing needs and challenges with a number of ALM and Test experts on stand from both Microsoft and our ALM Partner Network. If you, or someone in your organisation is attending EuroSTAR you can book an in-depth ThinkTANK session – email i-taniam@microsoft.com for available slots and if you have a great story to tell about how your Developers and Testers work well together you can enter our competition to win a unique award presented at the Gala Dinner on Thursday 24^th November. The winner of this award will also benefit from some great training around our Test tools or TFS. To enter: send your story in 500 words or less to i-taniam@microsoft.com by Friday 18^th November.

euroSTAR Test Talk Series

gdavi — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:19:28 GMT

In the run up to the November euroSTAR test conference, euroSTAR has started publishing a number of short podcasts on test related topics and there are three I’d like to point out (there are other podcasts there but these are the ones that relate directly to the Visual Studio test tools ):

Coded UI Test Automation with Visual Studio 2010, by Ian Holdsworth from Testhouse
How TFS supports Agile, by Danny Crone from nFocus
Microsoft has testing tools. Really? I didn’t know that. by yours truly

(Free login registration required)

Cheers,
Giles

Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN Licensing White Paper

gdavi — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:46:58 GMT

I ought to build up to this quite slowly in case the excitement is too much for the more sensitive reader, but the latest version of the Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN Licensing White Paper is now available!

But seriously folks, this can be a useful document if you’ve got questions or queries about licensing (when do I need a TFS CAL?) but if you have a licensing question that you’d like to discuss with someone then please let us know via ukvs@microsoft.com or even via twitter @ukvs and we’ll be happy to help.

Cheers,
Giles

Professional Scrum Developer course in November

gdavi — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:09:54 GMT

If you’re interested in a five day Scrum development course then you may be interested to know that Simon Reindl currently has places on the November course. This will be run at the Microsoft Campus in Reading from the 7th –11th November.

Course summary, with more details here, and registration here:

“This Scrum Developer course is a unique and intensive five-day experience for software developers. The course guides teams on how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software using the Scrum framework, Visual Studio 2010, and modern software engineering practices. Attendees will work in self-organizing, self-managing teams using a common instance of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to achieve this goal.

Course attendees are encouraged to take an assessment at course completion and then become Certified Professional Scrum Developers.”

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,Scrum,PSD

Using Excel to easily create reports from TFS Work Items

gdavi — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:47:13 GMT

I want to highlight an easy way to create project reports from data held in Team Foundation Server 2010 using Excel. There are a series of reports provided in the standard process templates (MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMi) in both SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) format and Excel. SRSS reports provide the ultimate power in reporting although they carry the cost of requiring SRSS skills if you want to modify them or create your own. The Excel route provides an equivalent set of reports that are perhaps more easily editable by the majority of people with PivotTable skills. What I want to cover here is a really easy way to create your own reports in Excel starting with Work Item Queries.

Let’s take a very simple imaginary scenario; I have a query that returns an interesting set of data from TFS (alright not very exciting in this case but just as an example this query returns all work items in the project):

I may be happy with results of this query – a list of work items that match the criteria – but I’d like to have an actual report based on this query. There is an extremely easy means of doing this – just right-click on the query in the Team Explorer and select Create Report in Excel:

Note that this option is only enabled for Flat List queries, not for Trees.

Having selected this option the query is analysed to determine the reports that could be created:

After which you can select which of the possible reports to include:

The next step does two useful things:

1. Connects Excel to the TFS reporting cube, in my case saving me from looking up or copying the connection string each time:

2. Creates a number of reports that use the data connection to provide PivotTable access to the reporting cube:

You can now alter the data in the report using the PivotTable Field List and Filters – giving you access to any data available in the cube, and of course you can change the graph format from the default pie chart to whatever form suits you better. You could also go on to publish the Excel chart to a SharePoint dashboard using Excel Data Services.

So – hopefully this highlights a quick and easy way to create custom reports from TFS, requiring minimal reporting skills and Excel.

Cheers,
Giles

Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,Reporting,Excel

Scrum for Team System v3 Open Sourced

gdavi — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:58:54 GMT

I had an interesting email update about Scrum for Team System today – version 3 is now open sourced and available from Codeplex, with support provided by Crispin Parker:

"Scrum for Team System has been my full time job for the past 4 years. Now I have left EMC Consulting (to pursue my own freelance career); I intend to keep SfTS alive through an open source initiative.

With the online community and SfTS Partners assistance, SfTS can continue to be the foremost free TFS Scrum resource for agile online community. Contributions are not only welcome, but are expected! If you use and love SfTS, then please get involved"

This is a great opportunity to contribute to this excellent process template and follows the open-sourcing of the TFS Workbench Scrum taskboard recently.

Cheers,
Giles

ALM Summit 2011

gdavi — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:41:30 GMT

If you’re interested in attending the Application Lifecycle Management for the Microsoft Platform summit in Redmond from 14th – 18th November then you can register here.

Speakers include:

Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President of the Visual Studio team,
Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Platform
Brian Harry, Technical Fellow and Product Unit Manager for the Team Foundation Server team

The agenda can be found here and the event includes:

A full-time, hands-on lab featuring self-guided tutorials on Team Foundation Server and Test Lab Management
Two focused breakout tracks—ALM Leadership and Agile Developer

Cheers,

Giles

iqnite UK 2011, 6th October

gdavi — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:42:00 GMT

We’ll be at the iqnite UK 2011 conference on the 6th October at the Russel Hotel in London. Microsoft is one of the sponsors of this conference and to quote the organisers:

“Communication, discussion and information - this is the key focus at the iqnite 2011 UK on 6th October in London. Get the very latest updates on new tools and technologies, plus a host of other topics and services relating to software quality. Build on this learning platform and enhance your network by actively participating in the conference. Take time to study our diverse conference programme. Discover new impressions and ideas for future business opportunities. The keynotes and presentations can provide support in your daily challenges and help increase project efficiency through distribution and application of newly gained knowledge.”

The agenda is here, and you can register here. If you’re there, do come to our booth and we’d be happy to chat about the Microsoft test tools and/or how they fit into the overall ALM solution.

Cheers,

Giles

TestExpo, London, 22nd September 2011

gdavi — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:45:00 GMT

We’re going to TestExpo next week at the QE2 conference center and I’m delighted that Danny Crone of nFocus will be presenting on “How can test tools help with the challenges of tomorrow’s world?”. It looks like an interesting agenda and we'll be at our stand and happy to have a chat.

Cheers,
Giles

More Team Foundation Service activation codes

gdavi — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:31:12 GMT

Brian Harry has extended the number of “bharry” activation codes for TFS Service Preview, so have give it a go if you’re interested!

Cheers,
Giles

Hosted TFS, Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 Developer Previews

gdavi — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:31:27 GMT

Wow, I’ve been struggling to keep up with the releases coming out so this is just a quick summary in case you haven’t seen it all. I’m then going to allocate some time to look at each of these in more detail and report back:

Hosted TFS

The Windows Azure based Visual Studio Team Foundation Service Preview has been announced. This provides a cloud hosted TFS solution supporting:

Source control
Work item tracking
Agile project management (a new feature in TFS 11)
Build automation (currently requiring a TFS 11 CTP build agent on your own hardware)

Brian Harry has provided a great overview of the TFS Preview.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

For a good overview see Jason Zander’s blog, but a quick summary:

Windows 8 Metro Apps support
Code Clone Analysis
Code Review Workflow
Exploratory Testing and Enhanced Unit Testing
.NET 4.5 Developer Preview

Now available to MSDN subscribers and on Friday to everyone.

Team Foundation Server 11

This is the Developer Preview of the TFS that supports the ALM features announced in at TechEds

Now available to MSDN subscribers and on Friday to everyone.

Cheers,
Giles

Technorati Tags: Hosted TFS,Visual Studio 11,Team Foundation Server 11

EuroSTAR Virtual Conference on Software Testing

gdavi — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:12:22 GMT

The EuroSTAR Virtual Conference on Software Testing takes place tomorrow and we’re going to be providing on-line chat coverage of our Microsoft Visual Studio “booth” together with nFocus and TestHouse. If you’re interested in having a look at the exhibition hall, which will have a number of videos, presentations and other downloads or even chatting to any of us at the virtual booth then you can find the event here (free registration required). I haven’t supported a virtual conference like this before so it should be interesting to see how it all goes.

Cheers,

Giles

Extending TFS to embed work items in check-in comments and link them to changesets

gdavi — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:33:29 GMT

I’ve been dabbling with TFS event handlers and check-in policies recently – which came about because I had a meeting with a Team Explorer Everywhere (TEE) user a few days ago and he mentioned that one of the things he’d like to see is the ability to include references to work items in the check-in comments. Why? If you know the work item id(s) you’re working on then finding them via a query in the pending changes view requires you to click to another tab, possibly change query, and then click each work item. If you could just put the work item ids in the comments then it would improve the flow at check-in. Something like “Fixed bug [123]”.

The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea, and my first reaction was that a custom check-in policy could provide a solution, by parsing the check-in comment for work item ids and then linking them to the changeset for the pending check-in. So, I started to write a check-in policy, first parsing for work items, then trying to link them to the changeset. After a while I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t access the changeset on the client side, or at least I couldn’t (and still can’t) find a way to access it. (If that’s wrong then please let me know).

Searching around I came across this extremely useful blog by Jakob Ehn at Inmeta. That post helped confirm my suspicions about client side access and paved the way to developing an event handler to achieve my intended solution. I took a look at Jakob’s merging event handler and that helped me a lot.

So, what I’ve ended up writing is a server side check-in event handler for TFS 2010 that parses the check-in comment looking for work item ids identified by square brackets:

In this case these three (it could be any number) work items will be validated (do these work items exist, do you have access to them) and then linked to the changeset for the check-in:

The event handler was actually fairly straight forward to write, once I had an example to work with. There are some good advantages to using an event handler:

Straightforward implementation (subject to whatever logic you want to invoke), including debugging.
Easy deployment. Add the .dlls to the TFS Application Tier plugin directory (in my case C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins). TFS even notices file changes in this folder and recycles the application pool to pick up the changes. Note that this does mean that there is a short period when TFS is not available (about 10 secs on my machine).
No impact on the clients – the event handler works without any changes being made to development machines, and also works immediately for both Visual Studio and Team Explorer Everywhere clients.

I found this an interesting problem to solve and I hope useful to others as well so I thought I’d share my code and binaries in the EmbeddedWorkItems codeplex project.

You can download or view the source and the binaries for the event handler. I also added in both a Visual Studio and a Team Explorer Everywhere check-in policy that provides some client side validation to ensure that valid work items are in the comment. These check-in policies are not required, but as the event handler will silently ignore invalid work item ids I thought it might be useful to be able to validate the work item ids before they get submitted.

So; there’s a C# event handler, a C# check-in policy and a Java check-in policy for you to view, use or extend and improve via codeplex. I’m sure there’s plenty of room for improvement in my implementation , and it’s the first time I’ve used the recently released Java TFS SDK (and it was a positive experience, the samples and documentation really helping me with the Java check-in policy).

I hope that either the event handler or policies are of use to you, or that the source has some value if you are considering your own customisation of TFS. It’s reconfirmed for me that I can add to or change the functionality of TFS relatively easily, and across both Visual Studio and Eclipse clients.

Cheers,
Giles

Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,Event Handler,Check-in Policy,SDK,Java,C#,Work Items,Embedded,Team Explorer Everywhere,Codeplex

Managing the size of attachments stored after Visual Studio 2010 or Test Manager test runs

gdavi — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:29:35 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 introduced significant new testing tools including the notion of “actionable bugs”. An actionable bug contains a configurable collection of diagnostic data including keystrokes, event logs, system information, IntelliTrace logs and even a screen cam of the test being performed. This greatly reduces the amount of data that the tester needs to collect and increases the amount of useful information for the developer, helping to drive faster bug resolution. All good stuff, but a question that comes up fairly often is where does this get stored, and can I manage the amount of space this is taking up on my server?

All of this data is stored in Team Foundation Server, and therefore is to be found in the TFS instance’s SQL Server. In terms of managing the space I see there being three main approaches:

Define and use appropriate test settings

Each test plan can have one or more test settings. Each test setting defines the exact combination of data that is recorded:

As a simplistic example I’ve defined a “Minimum Data” test setting, which may only record Actions and System Information, and an “All Possible Data” Test Setting that, well, records everything possible. When I run the tests I can then choose which test setting is most appropriate:

Fine tune each data adapter

Another option to be aware of is that within most of the data adapters there are options to play with that can effect the quantity of data collected. Click on the relevant Configure button and have a look at the options. Two examples I think are worth checking are the IntelliTrace settings (which events are you actually interested in, how big can the log file be etc.) and the Video Recorder:

These are self explanatory but you may well not want to save a video unless the test fails, and you can play around with quality, frame rate and bit rate to achieve the suitable compromise that suits your needs and balances video quality versus file size.

Cleanup after data has been recorded

The other option is to use the Test Attachment Cleaner for Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 & Test Professional 2010. This command line tool allows you to understand how much space is being taken up by which data and to delete the data you don’t want. The sample settings files that are supplied with the tool provide examples of how to :

Identify list of attachments taking up database space of more than 1 GB per attachment
View/Delete IntelliTrace log files over a size of 500 MB
View/Delete all Video log files with Test run creation date older than specific date with no active bugs
View/Delete all TRX & COV log files for test runs that happened between 30 and 90 days in age & do not perform the Linked Bugs lookup query
View/Delete all custom/user attachments over size of 5 MB with no active or resolved bugs on test runs between 2 dates

Cheers,

Giles