bharry's WebLog : tsbt-tfs

BizTalk Support with TFS

bharry — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:34:00 GMT

We get a reasonable amount of feedback from BizTalk users that would like a more seamless experience working with Team System and BizTalk. The number one complaint that I hear is that building BizTalk with Team Build is very difficult. The underlying reason for this is that BizTalk does not use msbuild for building their projects.

I've been working with the BizTalk team for the past several months to try to figure out how to fit this support in. I'm very happy to say that I've just been informed that they will be getting it into the upcoming BizTalk Server 2006 R3. I think this will be a nice improvement for all of you BizTalk/TFS users out there. You can read more about the R3 release here: http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/04/23/biztalk-server-platform-updates.aspx. Although this post doesn't mention the Team Build support specifically, I've been told it will be there. Of course that goes with my usual caveat of "plans are always subject to change", but we'll keep working with them to help make sure we can deliver this great feature.

Now I'm off to talk to the SQL Server Reporting Services team to get them to commit to a release to add this support in :) Those are the two I hear the most customer requests for. If there are more that are important to you, let me know and I'll see what we can do.

Brian

March '08 Team Foundation Server Power Tools Released

bharry — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:11:01 GMT

We've just released a new version of the TFS Power Tools. This new Power Tool release will work only with the VS/Team Explorer 2008 client (but against either a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server). If you haven't taken the time to upgrade yet, I highly recommend it - you are missing out on lots of great new value we are delivering.

Although this release is not quite as big as the record setting December '07 Power Tools release, it's packed with great stuff. It's got something for almost everyone but the largest portion will probably be most useful to TFS administrators. We know TFS administrators have been hurting and we are working hard to make their lives easy.

There are actually 2 downloads for this Power Tools release. You can read below for details as to why.

TFS 2008 March '08 Power Tools

64-bit TFS 2008 Sharepoint extensions installer

In addition to the new features listed, we have fixed quite a few Power Tools bugs. I don't have a complete list to share but I'm told there are some very important fixes that you will want if you use the Power Tools. The new features include:

Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls - This has been, perhaps, the most commonly requested enhancement. Anyone using custom work item controls knows that it has meant going back to editing XML for any work item type changes. This new feature allows you to continue to use the GUI editor when using custom controls.
TFSServerManager client - Long ago, I posted screen shots of the TFSServerManager tool we've written to monitor what's going on in a TFS server. The tool has finally made it into the Power Tools. The accompanying TFSServerMonitor that provides availability and performance counter data has not yet made it but we hope to get that into a future release. None-the-less, TFSServerManager alone, provide some great capability, including the ability to produce reports like the dogfood statistics posts that I do for our DevDiv server every month.
TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008 - In addition to various rule improvements and bug fixes, we have updated the TFS Best Practices Analyzer to work on Windows Server 2008. This enables this valuable tool to help trouble shoot issues on all supported operating systems while providing the minimal amount of "noise" and inappropriate warnings.
Work Item Template improvements - We've made a ton of usability improvements to the existing work item template Power Tool features. If you haven't tried out this feature yet, I strongly recommend it. It's a great way to pre-populate template bug reports (and other types of work items) with much of the required data and reduce the overhead of entering lots of similar kinds of bug reports. The biggest improvements include:
- Work item templates have moved from a separate tool window to a new node in the Team Explorer window (including support for organizing them in folder, cut/copy/paste, drag & drop, etc.

Editing work item templates now happens in a tool window in the document well rather than the somewhat odd looking scrollable modal dialog that it used to use. This includes full document integration - toolbar support, dirty state, etc.
With the integration into tool windows, we were able to significantly simplify the menu structure and reduce clutter.

Scriptable Team Project creation - Oh my has this one been on the back log for a while. It was a very common request right after we release TFS 2005 and we've finally gotten around to doing something about it. This Power Tools release includes a new tfpt command - "tfpt createteamproject" that can be used to create new Team Projects in scripts rather than having to use the GUI. There are a few important caveats here though. First, it will only work if you also have Team Explorer 2008 SP1 installed on the machine. There is a new API in Team Explorer 2008 SP1 that enables this new Power Tool command line. Team Explorer 2008 SP1? you say? How do I get that? Well, SP1 hasn't released yet and I haven't even blogged the new feature set in it yet. I expect some developments in those departments shortly. I hope to blog the feature set of TFS 2008 SP1 shortly and for the Beta release of TFS 2008 SP1 to follow soon after that. Keep your eyes peeled and know that once you get TFS 2008 SP1, this Power Tool feature will light up and suddenly scripting Team Project creation will become practical. Oh, an by the way, using Team Explorer 2008 SP1 and this Power Tool release, you can automate Team Project creation against both TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 servers.
Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms - Due to an unfortunate oversight in TFS 2008, our WSS installation tool does not support 64-bit Sharepoint. We are rectifying this oversight with this new release of the TFS Power Tools. We now have a TFS WSS extensions installer that will work on 64-bit Sharepoint installations. Because this will only be needed by a few administrators/operations personnel, we chose not to include it in the main Power Tools download but instead to make it a separate download that can be found here.
Unshelve to a different branch - tfpt unshelve now supports a new option "tfpt unshelve /migrate" that will unshelve a shelveset to a different branch than it was originally authored in. This provides a handy way to move pending changes from one branch to another without checking them in and merging and without having to do a bunch of manual work to figure out the common base version between the branches and work out the merge relationships. A very handy addition that we use quite a lot internally.
Improvements to tfpt review - We use tfpt review internally for managing code reviews and have gotten a bunch of feedback on how it could be better - particularly in performance of moving between the file changes. We've made several improvements to make the experience better.
Delete global lists in the work item tracking system - tfpt destroygl now allows you to delete global lists from the work item tracking system. Previously there was no way to eliminate a global list once it had been created. In the future, I hope to see this ability incorporated into the Process Template Editor, but for now, at least it is available.
Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes - Bound Office documents (Excel spreadsheets and Project plans) include the TFS server name so that they can refresh their work item lists without prompting the user to connect to TFS. Unfortunately, there has been no way to update the server name in the event that you rename your TFS server. With the introduction of tfpt changedocurl, you can now update the server name, port number, etc in bound Office documents.
Performance improvements in tfpt online - I'm not sure how many people this will be a big deal for, but it's been a big complaint internally where we have 10's or 100's of thousands of files in an average workspace. If you have large workspaces and you use tfpt online, you will likely notice that it now puts less load on the server and takes less time.

That's it but as you can see it's a long list and it's got something for almost everyone. I really hope you enjoy it and, as always, please send me any feedback you have. We are committed to continuing to deliver high demand improvements at every opportunity. I mentioned TFS 2008 SP1 in this post briefly. As I said, I'll be blogging about it soon and I really can't wait. The list of improvements is HUGE - probably twice the size of this list. Add that to the new version of Team System Web Access that's being previewed now (see my earlier post) and it's an exciting time for VSTS 2008 users.

Thanks,

Brian

New TFS Specs Available

bharry — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:38:25 GMT

We continue in our effort to publish specs for features that are under development very early in the process so that we can incorporate your feedback before we are even done coding it. We haven't published as many as I had hoped but we continue to emphasize the importance of it within the team and are starting to see some real momentum. While I was out on sabbatical, 3 new specs were published.

Codename “TFS Bug Submission Portal” Power Tool for Team Foundation Server 2008 - This covers the new limited TFS access for users without CALs. I just wrote a longer blog post about it announcing the availability of a CTP.

Send Mail from TFS - The spec for a new feature coming in TFS 2008 SP1 (more about that in the next week or two when I write a blog post about all the great stuff that's coming in SP1).

Core Linking Work Item Tracking - This spec covers the core enhancements to work item tracking that enables hierarchies, typed links and more coming in Rosario. This underlying improvement is going to enable an amazing number of new scenarios.

Further, this week I am expecting to see 2 more specs published...

Query Folders - A feature for enabling you to organize your work item queries into a folder hierarchy.

Enterprise TFS Management - An overhaul of some of the TFS application architecture that is going to enable substantially greater deployment flexibility and manageability in the enterprise environment.

Keep your eyes peeled for the new specs and we look forward to your feedback on the ones we've already published if you haven't already given it.

Brian

A Great Deck on TFS and Distributed Development

bharry — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:02:00 GMT

Bill Essary did a fantastic talk this week on how TFS works in a distributed environment. This talk shows how the various TFS components communicate. It gives guidance on how these communication paths put constraints on the network topology. It explains how these constraints can be applied in a distributed development environment. It also includes some great links at the end for further reading. I've attached a copy of the deck to this blog post.

Brian

Requirements management with Team System

bharry — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:16:00 GMT

Here's a nice blog series I ran across on requirements management with Team System, Team Foundation Server and some 3rd party products. We are also working on a whitepaper to provide an overview of this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-1-of-4-overview.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-2-of-4-tfs-out-of-the-box.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-3-of-4-integrations.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-4-of-4-summary.aspx

Brian

A customer's experience with TFS and Teamprise for Java development

bharry — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:38:00 GMT

Yesterday someone forwarded me a link to a Minnesota user group presentation on using TFS and Teamprise in a mixed .NET and Java shop. Being, admittedly, somewhat biased, I thought it was a terrific presentation on their experiences and felt is was worth sharing. If you (like so many organizations) do both .NET development and Java development, TFS + Teamprise can be a terrific solution for you.

The one thing that made me feel bad was that they mentioned they had problems with TS Web Access and Firefox. I've asked the team to look into that (contacting the author if necessary) to understand it and make sure it works well on Firefox.

Brian

Checking your TFS Version and Extending Trials

bharry — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:38:00 GMT

As with Team Foundation Server 2005, we are publishing a utility that you can run on your TFS server to determine what version of TFS it is and, if it is trial, how many days remain until it expires. It also enables you to extend trials by 30 days.

The program is called TFSVersionDetection.exe and is attached to this blog post (or can be requested from Customer Support). I recommend that you run the tool on the TFS server itself. You can run it from another machine and point it at the TFS server but it does a less thorough job of detection (due to permissions issues, etc). If you run it on the TFS server and press the "Check" button, you will see a screen that look something like the following.

If you are within 10 days of expiration of a Trial Edition or pre-release (Beta 2 or RC) install, an "Extend" button will show up in the lower left hand corner. Pressing it will extend the expiration another 30 days. For Trial Edition (not for pre-releases), the "Extend" button will show up again when your 30-day extension nears an end. Pressing it at this point will bring up a dialog that asks for a new Trial ID. It is possible to extend it another 30 days if absolutely necessary. To do this, you will need to contact your Microsoft sales rep and ask them to help you get a new Trial ID. If they don't understand the process, they can email me at bharry@microsoft.com or Brian Keller - briankel@microsoft.com and one of us will help them.

Brian

How do I upgrade to TFS 2008?

bharry — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:18:00 GMT

Now that Team Foundation Server 2008 keys/media/downloads are available, I'm seeing lots more questions about various scenarios. I'm going to try to capture all of the less obvious issue here:

You have TFS 2008 Trial Edition installed and you want to upgrade to TFS Standard Edition

You need to go to Add/Remove programs and click Change/Uninstall on your TFS installation. This will display a dialog in which you should click on "Upgrade". You can then enter a new product key. If you bought full packaged product (and actually got media) you will have the key you need in the material you purchased. It's not so simple for volume license customers because they don't actually get media - they download the bits from the volume licensing web site and the key is not obvious. The "official" policy is that you are supposed to call Customer Support and ask for your product key. There is a simpler way, if you choose. If you look in your download for a folder called "AT" (stands for Application Tier). You will find a file called "setup.sdb". Open that file in notepad (or any text editor). Search for "[Product Key]?. The next line is your product key. You can enter this string into the dialog presented from Add/Remove programs and click OK. Your TFS server is now fully upgraded to Standard Edition.

You have TFS 2008 Trial Edition installed and you want to upgrade to Workgroup Edition

You must uninstall trial (your data will not be lost - although backups are always advisable) and install Workgroup Edition.

You have TFS 2008 Workgroup Edition installed and you want to upgrade to TFS Standard Edition

This scenario is intended to work like #1 (upgrade trial to standard), However, there is a bug that makes this a bit tricky. If you use Add/Remove Programs to enter a new product key, you will find that the product key field is greyed out - this is not "by design". I've been told that if you run setup from the media (rather than Add/Remove Programs), the ID field will not be read-only. Alternatively, you can uninstall Workgroup Edition and then install Standard Edition. As far as getting the proper product key (for volume license users), see # 1 above.

You have TFS Beta 2 or Release Candidate

TFS 2008 Beta 2 and Release Candidates releases are about to expire (the RC expires in the next week or two and the Beta expires in mid March). Please make sure you upgrade VERY SOON. You can upgrade to TFS 2008 Trial Edition, Workgroup Edition or Standard Edition. You will perform the upgrade by unintalling the Beta or RC and then installing your chosen edition. If they actually expire, you have a 1 time only shot at extending it for 30-days (using the new TFSVersionDetection tool that you will find in this blog post).

You have TFS 2005 and want to upgrade to TFS 2008

As a general rule, this is straight forward. You just uninstall TFS 2005 (all your data will be preserved) and install TFS 2008. New client and old clients will both work. By far the trickiest part will be upgrading from Sharepoint 2.0 to Sharepoint 3.0 (2007) or MOSS 2007. My best advice is read the corresponding upgrade instructions (ours and/or WSS). The TFS installation guide is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=FF12844F-398C-4FE9-8B0D-9E84181D9923&displaylang=en. And here's a reference to the Sharepoint upgrade instructions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb421259.aspx

Brian

Koders announces search support for Team Foundation Server

bharry — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:27:00 GMT

Koders, a popular development search tool, has announced support for searching Team Foundation Servers. In addition to the ability to index your source, work items, etc, they have a Visual Studio plugin that enables access from within Visual Studio and integration in the Team System Web Access that enables it from within the Team System web experience. Check it out!

· TSWA + Koders code search screencast: http://www.koders.com/corp/products/pro/demos/tfswa/

· Koders Pro for .NET Developers: http://www.koders.com/corp/products/pro/microsoft-net/

Brian

VSTS Web Access Power Tool for Team System 2008 released!

bharry — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:06:09 GMT

Today we are releasing the "final" TFS 2008 based release of the Web Access Power Tool. I put "final" in quotes because the release model for Power Tools is a little different than for our major product versions. Rather than releasing "big" releases every couple of years, we release smaller ones as needed. So I fully expect there will be a few updates to the current tool before the Rosario version ships.

This final release is very similar the the last CTP we released but is now complete and ready for prime time. In addition to fixing as many bugs as we could find, this new release of Web Access includes:

New linkable web pages - This is, perhaps, the coolest feature in the release. It allows you to easily link to work items, work item queries, work item query results, Changesets, File/Folder history, file differences, file contents and annotated views of files. This makes TSWA a far more powerful building block for integration with other applications. In fact, we've already started work to leverage this from notification emails so that you can get a richer experience. Because the notification emails are user configurable, you can read Neno Loje's poston how to modify work item alert emails to use TSWA links. Look forward to some future suggestions on how you can customize your checkin notification to get a richer experience using TSWA. See Buck's post for details on how to use the new TSWA links.

Custom work item controls - Web Access now supports custom work item controls. Now it is possible to create a rich client version and a web version of custom work item controls and have your fully customized experience available no matter which interface your users access. You'll find documentation for writing custom controls in the SDK folder under you TSWA installation folder.

Team Build support - Web Access has been updated to support several of the new features in TFS 2008 for build automation. Most importantly, it allows you to view the queue of builds and queue new builds.

Performance improvements - Every release of Web Access includes more performance improvements. The more we use the tool internally, the more we learn about it. Every time we find issues, we fix them and release them to you as soon as possible. The big performance improvements in this release are around server memory consumption.

No more TSWA users group - The 2005 Power Tool required that you manage a user group of web access users for security reasons. We've improved the server side impersonation and directory management to eliminate the need for this. TSWA can now manage access securely just using the permission settings you already have and no longer requires a "special" restricted group. This should make managing TSWA easier.

Documentation - It's not extensive but should be enough for you to find your way around TSWA. You'll find it located here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892990(VS.90).aspx

Enjoy!

Brian

TFS 2008 System Recommendations

bharry — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:39:05 GMT

We have just completed our testing for TFS 2008 scalability and are ready to publish the final recommendations on server sizing and hardware configurations. If you want to compare this to the TFS 2005 recommendations, you will find them here.

Ultimately making capacity recommendations is a little like throwing darts at a board. The problem is that no two teams are the same. They use different processes, have different usage patterns, have different sized applications, are organized differently, etc. When we make estimates on things like how much load an average user puts on the system, we base that largely on what we observe in our own use of our internal TFS installation. It's not perfect and it changes over time. If you read the details below, I'll spell out all of the assumptions we made.

Quite a few things have changed since TFS 2005.

Hardware has progressed and prices have changed.
We've made an amazing number of performance improvements to TFS.
We've reassessed the average amount of load that a user puts on the system.
We've reevaluated the data size that teams of various sizes generate.

The net result though is that our recommendations, while more conservative, afford more users on similarly sized hardware.

The recommendations

Before I go into any gory detail, I'll spell out the configurations we tested and the results we got.

There's several things to note about this.

There's fewer configs than we published in TFS 2005 - We found that the extra 2 configs really didn't add much value given the current hardware market.
All of the user ratings are higher than for similar configs in TFS 2005 - as I said, we did a lot of performance work :). And these improvements are in spite of the fact that we raised the load per user significantly.
The hardware configs don't match - Unfortunately in the intervenening 2 years (almost), we've had changes in the hardware in our lab and this is what we had available. You will note that we generally increased the memory recommendations and that's based on our experience over the past couple of years.
We added a TFS proxy for the higher end configurations - Proxies offload some of the download activity from the TFS server. The performance benefit isn't huge but many of our larger installations use them so we've added them to the mix.

How we arrived at the recommendations

For a good background on the general approach we use to determine TFS's scaling abilities, read http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2005/10/24/how-many-users-will-your-team-foundation-server-support.aspx. While the numbers in that post are out of date, the methodology is still accurate.

Load per user

The biggest change between TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 is that we changed the assumption for the amount of load an average user puts on TFS. We measure this on our own DevDiv TFS server by looking at load patterns and dividing by the number of "active" users. When we shipped TFS 2005, an average user in DevDiv used approximately 0.1 requests per second (in other words, an average of 1 request every 10 seconds during peak usage hours). That number has gone up quite a bit in the intervening year and a half or so. Why? Well it's hard to know for sure but I can speculate on a few things.

We've moved to a much more branch intensive development methodology. Every feature is now developed in a separate branch and merged when it is done. This has yielded quite a lot more activity around creating, deleting and merging branches.
There are more automated tools built for TFS now. TFS is used much more widely now and many more processes and add-on tools have been developed around it. Automated tools often put substantially more load on the system than people do.

The end result is that we are now using 0.15 requests per second per user. That's a 50% increase over the number that we used to compute TFS 2005 capacity. So just to maintain the same user recommendation, TFS 2008 has to be 50% faster on the same hardware.

Data size

Another key change is that we've reassessed the amount of data that corresponds to various team sizes. We've done a survey of usage by different teams to determine how big their databases are on average. The result, in some cases, is almost a 10X increase in the size of the databases we tested with. This also, of course, causes TFS to have to work harder to accomplish the same throughput on the same hardware. Here are the sizes we used for TFS 2008:

These numbers are based on teams at the higher end of each range. They are also based on the amount of data accrued over about a 2 year period. Of course all teams are different and your numbers may be higher or lower but at least you know what assumptions we used.

An example of how these data size assumptions affect the performance of TFS. Look at the Avg workspace size column. This is the number of files that users typically work with on teams of that size. When our load testing simulates a version control "get" operation, it is getting that many files. So a get on a 3,600 person team is a 20 times larger operation than a get on a 250 person team.

Hardware

The last substantial change we made was to the hardware configurations. Some of this was deliberate - for example, we decided to start officially including 8 proc data tier numbers because, with the advent of multi-core machines (particularly quad core), an 8 proc machine is no longer an outrageously expensive machine. In fact the 8P machine we tested on was actually a quad core dual proc machine.

As I mentioned above, we also added TFS proxies to the two larger configs. We did this because many of our larger customers use proxies and we use them internally quite a lot. In fact, we've set up proxies even on the same LAN for our highest demand users. For example, our build lab has its own proxy because it does approximately 75 full gets of a several million file tree every day. It probably adds up to 3 or 4 million file downloads a day. In our simulation, we configured half of the users to use the proxy. This doesn't actually mean that half of their load went to the proxy because it only handles downloads. Downloads are comparatively inexpensive and all other load goes straight to the TFS server.

Some of it was not deliberate. The hardware availability in our lab changes and the drive arrays and machines we used last time had been used for something else. So we picked machines that were generally close to what we tested last time. The only thing I regret is that we didn't have higher performance drive arrays to test. The 3,600 user configuration should have been a SAN and the 2,200 user configuration should have at least been a SCSI array instead of a SATA2. I suspect the differences wouldn't have been huge but the higher capability I/O systems would have provided better performance and been more realistic to what someone would use in a production environment.

Conclusion

The end result is that our hardware configurations for TFS 2008 allow for more users for similar hardware than our recommendations for TFS 2005. Our recommendations are based on a substantially more conservative estimate of how much load a user puts on the system. I'd estimate that between the increased request load, increased data size, etc, the estimates for TFS 2008 assume about double the load per user.

TFS 2008 is more than twice as fast as TFS 2005 and can support extremely large teams. Of course, even larger teams can deploy multiple servers and scale to any size they need.

I'm interested in your own stories about your experience with TFS 2008 performance if you have them. Please feel free to share.

Brian

TFS and Sharepoint (WSS) 2.0 SP3

bharry — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:06:00 GMT

We have completed testing TFS with WSS 2.0 SP3 and everything works as expected. It should be safe to use it in a production TFS deployment and it will be fully supported.

Thanks,

Brian

September TFS Power Tools Released

bharry — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 12:57:00 GMT

Today we released the Sept 2007 version of the TFS Power Tools. There's a couple of great new things in them. First, before I get to that, this release of the Power Tools only works with the TFS 2005 client. This will be the last release of the Power Tools for the TFS 2005 client. Future releases will require and work with the TFS 2008 client - all the more reason for you to upgrade :)

There are two major new features in this release of the Power Tools:

TFS Work Item Templates
Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer (TfsBpa)

See the section towards the end for a couple of things to watch out for during installation. If you have any questions or problems with the Power Tools, you can go to the TFS Power Tool forum at: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=930&SiteID=1

Work Item Templates

Work item templates are a fantastic feature if you are tired of repetitively filling out tons of fields on bug reports. I'm not proud to say that our internal bug definition has 75 or more fields associate with it and at least 8 or 10 of them are required. Work item templates allow you to pre-fill in as many of the fields that you like and then create new work items based on that template. I used the Power Tool last week and it was a huge help. We were doing what we call Metal UP testing (MUP) that basically means starting with bare machines in different configurations and installing TFS following the installation guide. I took one of the scenarios and found about 20 documentation issues in the process. The work item templates feature saved me a ton of time entering all of these issues.

Using my example, I'll show you a bit how it works. On the Team Menu, you'll find a work item templates menu like this:

If you show the tool window, it will look something like this:

You'll notice I've created 2 work item templates. Creating or editing a template looks like this (the MUP UE Doc Bug in this case):

If you look close enough you can see that the only required field I didn't fill in is the Title (because it will be different for every bug). The other 2 required fields (State and Bug Type) have default values and will be filled in automatically. I warned you we have a lot of fields :) And this doesn't even show the 6 or 7 tabs at the bottom of the form :(

When you double click on the template in the tool window, it will create a new work item of the right type with all of the fields filled in according to the template.

You can save as many different bug templates as you like. They are just stored as .wt files under Documents and Settings. You can also send them to other people and they can drop them in their folder and use them - nice, eh?

Hopefully you'll like this feature as much as I do and if you do, it will probably make it into the product at some point in the future.

Best Practices Analyzer

Oh my has this tool been a big help. It's no secret that TFS configuration can be complicated and diagnosing when it has gone wrong requires some expertise. Well, we've finally delivered that expertise in the form of the TFS Best Practices Analyzer. This tool runs against your system and analyzes everything we've thought to look for so far and tells you when your system is not configured correctly (and why). We've been using this tool on support cases for the last few months and it has dramatically reduced the time necessary to figure out what's wrong with TFS. Now we're delivering this tool as a Power Tool for all to use.

We have not yet updated the BPA to scan TFS 2008 servers. We expect to include that support in the next release of the Power Tools.

TfsBpa has two modes. You can either run it as a pre-install check to make sure all your prereqs are right for TFS or you can run it as a post install "health check" to find out what's wrong when TFS isn't quite working right. All kinds of things can go wrong (like service account passwords expiring) that are difficult to track down - but not any longer.

TfsBpa can also be run on the client or the server. Generally it should be run on the server (application tier) as an administrative user to validate your TFS server. When run on the client, it can validate your client install and do rudimentary checking against your server. However, most of the investment we've done is in checks of your server, when run on your server.

Here's what the intro screen looks like:

Beware, the tool checks a ton of stuff so it isn't exactly fast. It may take 10 minutes or so to fully health check your server.

Installation issues

There are some conditions under which the VBScript runtime engine is not enabled on Vista. The Power Tools use it both for installation and uninstallation. A common symptom of this problem is "Internal Error 2738". You can register the VBScript runtime by:

Run a command prompt as administrator
Cd to c:\windows\system32 (or the equivalent)
Run regsvr32 vbscript.dll

There is also an issue installing the TfsBpa on a 64 bit system. This is because the Powershell is a prereq and they don't set the proper registry key on 64 bit sot that we can tell it is installed. If you are installing on a 64 bit system, do the following:

Install 64 bit PowerShell appropriate for the platform.
Run the PowerTool install.
When you see the screen which says you don’t have PowerShell installed (Feature Prerequisites Needed). The “Feature Prerequisites Needed” will also appear if Microsoft DSL Tools Redistributable is not installed. If it asks about that prereq, click Download and install it as requested.
Click Next.
Click Custom, then Next.
In the tree, Best Practices Analyzer will have a red X. Click on the X, and select “This feature will be installed on local hard drive”.
Click Next, then Install.

That's all I know of right now. If I hear of additional reports, I'll post about them.

Conclusion

I hope you find these new additions to the TFS Power tools as compelling as I do. If you've already (or will soon) adopted TFS 2008, keep your eyes open for the TFS 2008 version coming in the next few months. Not only will it have TFS 2008 and versions of everything we've shipped so far, it will also include a hand full of other cool new Power Tools that are nearly complete.

Brian

TFS Migration & Synchronization Tool For ClearCase Released

bharry — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:07:00 GMT

Yesterday we released a new tool that will help customers who use both Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and ClearCase or are migrating from ClearCase to TFS. It is available for download today at no additional charge for licensed users of TFS (server and CALs). We are hoping to release some updates to TFS licensing soon that will simplify it for people using tools like this to synchronize TFS with other SCM systems. For now read our licensing whitepaper to understand the requirements.

This new ClearCase -> TFS migration and synchronization tool provides the ability to migrate ClearCase data to TFS, and it also provides a service that will keep items in sync between TFS and ClearCase. Together, these features will make the process of migrating from ClearCase to TFS much simpler, and far more automated. It enables you to make a one time switch and preserve your data and history or it allows a longer term cooexistance by allowing different people or teams to use ClearCase and TFS while ensuring that all of the data and history is available to all users.

A quick summary of the features of the tool:

Supports migration of base ClearCase VOBs
Migrate a snapshot of source control to TFS
Migrate files to Team Foundation Server while preserving history
Migrate branches to Team Foundation Server retaining the branching structure/hierarchy
Bidirectional synchronization of data between TFS and ClearCase

You can get forum support at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=478&SiteID=1 if you have questions or need help. We're also working to arrange official CSS phone support.

In concert with releasing this new ClearCase -> TFS migration and synchronization tool, we have launched a new web page to serve as a hub of information about integration of TFS with other SCM products. This includes information both on our own offerings and on third party offerings. If you see any that are missing, please let me know and we'll make sure to get them added. I already know of a couple of missing things - our own ClearQuest conversion tool and the offerings from http://www.componentsoftware.com

Also, if you want to stay up to date on the latest news, you can follow that TFS migration blog.

Brian

Final TFS 2008 Feature List

bharry — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:35:00 GMT

Gee, time flies when you are having fun. I can't believe it's been another 4 months since my last post on Orcas features.

At this point TFS 2008 is basically done! We've got a few bugs left to fix and we are still taking feedback from Beta 2 but we're focusing on quality, stability and ensuring TFS works in a wide array of configurations at this point. As such, I expect this to be my final feature list post for TFS 2008. I hope you are happy with what we've done. Hopefully you've picked up Beta 2 and tried it out for yourself. We've really tried to focus on addressing things that are most important to you. Most of the feedback I've seen on Beta 2 so far has been very positive.

From here on out, I'll be doing separate posts on our Rosario feature list as that unfolds.

I've marked significant additions since the last roadmap report with (new). I've marked things that did not make Beta 2 but will be in RTM as (RTM).

Administration, Operations & Setup

Share Point 2007 support
Enable use of Sharepoint on any server and any port
Support for MOSS 2007
Enable support for Reporting Services on any server and any port (new) (RTM)
Support for SQL Named Instances – This will allow customers to share a SQL server between multiple TFS instances, or with other applications. This has been a commonly requested feature by enterprises.
“Longhorn” server support – TFS will support the next version of the server (and corresponding new version of IIS) that is currently under development.
Sync Large Groups – This is a set of work to improve the performance and robustness of TFS’s handling large groups of users (~30,000 or more) granted permission to a TFS instance. Today this can result in a support call to recover from it.
Non-default ports – We’ve gotten a bunch of feedback from enterprise customers about TFS’s limited support for alternate web sites and ports running afoul of data center policies. We are going to be improving TFS’s configurability in this respect in Orcas.
Simplify installation – In Orcas, we will be doing a variety of things to attempt to make installing TFS easier and quicker than it is now. Improvements include eliminating the separate data-tier installation, simplifying the requirements around required domain accounts by supporting the built in machine accounts (like Network Service) where we can, etc.
Official testing and support for more configurations - This includes clustering, mirroring, log shipping, Virtual machine deployment, and more.
Support for client certificates
Upgrade from TFS 2005
Support for SQL 2008 (aka Katmai) (new) (RTM)
TFSDeleteProject now permanently deletes (destroys) version control content (new) (RTM)
New role for many operations activities (new) (RTM) - You don't have to be server administrator to run many of the admin utilities any longer.
Enhancements to tfsadminutil (new) (RTM) - New capability to configure accounts, connections, etc on both TFS and the TFS proxy.

Build (more detail)

Support multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
Continuous Integration – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management, drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
Improved ability to specify what source, versions of source, and other build properties.
Improved extensibility of the build targets – such as ability to easily execute targets before and after each solution/project is built.
Improved ability to manage multiple build machines.
Stop and delete builds from within VS.
.NET Object model for programming against the build server.
Simplified ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build.
The ability to store build definitions anywhere in the version control hierarchy.
Scheduled builds - You can schedule builds to happen at specified times.
Improved build agent communication - We replaced .NET binary remoting with WCF web services, simplifying some configuration and security aspects.
Ability to run GUI tests as part of a build - Automated builds used to run tests in such a way as to prevent access to a GUI desktop.
New checkin policy for broken CI builds - Preventing checkin while the CI build is broken.
Support for HTTPS communication to the TFS server (new)
Continuous Integration build checkin policy (new)
Support for incremental gets and builds (new)

Data Warehouse

Add support for checkin policy overrides to the warehouse - an oversight from V1.

Migration

Migration toolkit – A toolkit for building conversion and mirroring solutions between TFS and other systems. In addition, we will release one or more new tools to integrate with popular alternative systems.

Version Control

Annotate – This is based on the TFS Annotate Power Tool but includes numerous improvements.
Folder Diff – Also based on the TFS Tree Diff Power Tool with numerous improvements.
Destroy – The ability to permanently delete version control files/folders from TFS. It can also be used to destroy the file contents while preserving the change set history.
Get Latest On Checkout – There have been many requests for this feature (which was a change in behavior from SourceSafe). There is now an option that allows you to specify that you want TFS to download the latest version of files when you check them out.
Workspace improvements – Workspaces will now support mapping a folder or file under a cloaked folder and wildcard mappings so that you can map all files in a folder without mapping sub folders. Based on experience with large projects, this will simplify workspace definitions for many people.
Performance improvements – A variety of Version Control performance enhancements that will improve virtually all aspects of version control performance. The gains for smaller servers/projects (< 10,000 files) will be modest. The gains for larger projects (particularly where the file count approaches 100,000’s) will be substantial.
Scale improvements – Fixed out of memory problems on the server when operating on more than a few hundred thousand files at a time.
Offline improvements - We've signficantly improved the experience going offline and integrated the tfpt online capability into the IDE for going back online.
Extranet support for the TFS Proxy - allowing you to access a local TFS proxy with a different set of credentials than the TFS server.
Command line help - You can now type "tf command /help" and get a console dump of the usage of that command. This is much more convenient than always being launched into the richer GUI hypertext help when you just want to remember what the options for a command are. You can still launch the GUI help by running "tf msdn". You can get a console dump of available commands by just typing "tf help".
Source Control Explorer refresh improvements - This includes less redrawing and reloading but even more important it enables updates based on changes made in other instances of TeamExploror or the command line. That's right, if you checkout a file from the command line, any instances of TeamExplorer you have running on the same machine will automatically refresh.
Async loading of the Source Control Explorer (new)
The SCE local path can now be selected and copied (new)
Merge improvements (new) - Improved the logic that detects merge conflicts to generate fewer false positives and handle more scenarios.

Work Item Tracking

Performance & Scale improvements – A variety of improvements that will make both the work item server and client faster and able to handle larger servers.
Query builder usability improvements - Drop down filtering based on current project, better MRU lists, column drag & drop, shift-click mouse based multi-column sorting, etc.
Attachments improvements - Save button, drag & drop for adding an attachment, multi-select for attaching files.
Tooltips on field names contain the field name used for querying
Server side support for deleting work items & work item types - We didn't have time to do client UI support for it but we plan to release a Power Tool that will take advantage of the new server side feature.
Support for security on the iteration hierarchy (new)

Web Access

Adding Web Access UI to TFS - As you've seen many places, we acquired devBiz and their TeamPlain Web Access product. We are releasing it as a Power Tool in the next few months and plan to release it as an official product in the Orcas timeframe. We have not figured out how the release date will line up with the Orcas date but it will be in the same general timeframe.

Bug fixes

In addition to all of the feature work, we’ve spent months testing the product and fixing any bugs we’ve found. We expect Orcas will have even better stability and robustness than TFS 2005.

Compatibility (no change since last time)

As Orcas is an adoption focused release, we have put a lot of emphasis on compatibility with VS2005. We are striving for near 100% compatibility. The Orcas client will be able to work with a VS2005 server and a VS2005 client will be able to work with an Orcas server. There are only a few compatibility issues.

Client side VS add-ins will need to be recompiled (or have policy changed) because the TFS OM assembly versions will change and add-ins will need to bind to the new assemblies. The APIs themselves are generally not changing, so we don’t expect much in the way of code changes – just recompilation.
Build is the only area where we plan to have some compatibility disconnects. In general, most build operations - listing build definitions, starting and stopping builds, examining build reports, etc. will work both with 2005 client -> Orcas server and Orcas client -> 2005 server. However, here are a few caveats:

An Orcas TFS server will only work with an Orcas build server - so you'll need to upgrade your build server when you upgrade your TFS server.
For an VS2005 client to start a build on an Orcas server, the build definition needs to be stored at $/<TeamProject>/TeamBuildTypes/<name>. In Orcas, you have more flexibility as to where to put them.
Changes made to properties in the .proj file that are in the database in Orcas will not be updated in the database and will no longer be in sync.
VS2005 will be able to start a build, but it can’t queue a build, see the list of builds in the queue, see the list of build agents, etc.
An Orcas client will not be able to create a new build definition on a TFS2005 server.
When starting a build, an Orcas client will not be able to change any parameters in the dialog for a TFS2005 Server.

Brian