bharry's WebLog : tsbt

TFS 2010 for SourceSafe Users

bharry — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:53:00 GMT

We started building SourceSafe in January 1992 in the vacated dining room of the house belonging to one of my partners. Within a couple of short years SourceSafe went from concept to major success and was acquired by Microsoft in 1994, soon after which it became the most widely used version control system in the world. The thing that was truly novel about SourceSafe in the early 1990s was that it was really easy to learn and use. People tried it and just liked it. It wasn’t the most powerful system around but it had what people needed and was a refreshing break from complicated command line oriented interfaces.

However SourceSafe was designed and built in the early 90’s and a lot has changed since then. Technologies are different – the internet really didn’t exist in a meaningful way (web browsers were in early experimentation), databases were still complicated products primarily used for enterprise mission critical data, etc; and development is a lot different – projects were much smaller and less sophisticated then. The emergence of Visual Basic in the early 90’s really changed the landscape of development and brought a lot of people into the field who would have never previously considered it and made custom software a much bigger part of people’s lives.

Other trends have developed and gained a great deal of momentum. Frustration with traditional ways of executing software projects, the Agile set of development methodologies have become VERY popular, bringing with them a new set of practices - unit testing, continuous integration, TDD, and more.

Right around the beginning of 2003 – almost 11 years after beginning the SourceSafe journey, I and a few other people embarked to create Team Foundation Server. The goal was to create a development team collaboration product that would meet the needs of virtually any development team for the next couple of decades. It is based on modern technologies – SQL Server, ASP.NET, Web Services, .NET, etc. And it takes a comprehensive view of the software development lifecycle, with the intent of ultimately addressing all phases and all participants.

To make sure we could handle the broadest range, we started by targeting enterprise customers and development teams with more involved development processes. The pinnacle of that has been the Microsoft Developer Division experience that I’ve talked so much about where we have over 3,500 regular users and terrabytes upon terrabytes of data. However, it has been our intention from the beginning to build a toolset that is attractive to teams of all sizes and all levels of process.

For smaller teams, the most common complaints about TFS 2005 were that it was expensive, difficult to install, difficult to manage and required onerous pre-reqs. We made good progress on the setup experience in TFS 2008, although most of that was oriented towards enterprise customers who needed more installation flexibility.

Fast forward now to TFS 2010…

TFS 2010 represents a huge step forward in making TFS more approachable by smaller teams. With software development technology continuing to advance and SourceSafe slowly looking older, TFS 2010 is a great opportunity for SourceSafe users to look at updating their toolset.

So what’s different about TFS 2010?

There are 3 main areas that we’ve focused on in 2010 to make TFS attractive to smaller teams:

Price – We’re not quite ready to announce the pricing and licensing for 2010 yet but I can tell you that it will be at least as easy and cost effective to get as SourceSafe has been. Stay tuned for more info on this.
Pre-reqs – We’ve eliminated the vast majority of the restrictions TFS has historically had:

TFS 2010 can be installed on a domain controller – We understand that many small organizations don’t have spare servers lying around and they need to be able to consolidate their servers. Now if you just have one server and it’s your domain controller, email server and whatever else you need it for, you can use it for TFS too!
TFS 2010 can be installed on client OSes – The TFS server can be installed on Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium and above. Of course it can also be installed on server OSes (Windows 2K3, Windows 2K8 and Windows 2K8 R2). If you want to run version control locally on your laptop – you can do that. In fact, just to prove it out, I bought a Samsung N110 Netbook and installed VS 2010, TFS 2010 and a build server all on the Netbook, running Windows 7 and it works!
TFS 2010 supports both 32 & 64 bit – No matter whether you’re running a newer 64-bit OS or an older 32-bit OS, TFS will work on your system.

Installation – Installing TFS has been a pain point for years. Although it’s gotten better, 2010 represents a quantum leap. The TFS installer now has 3 wizards: Basic, Standard and Advanced. The big innovation is the new “Basic” install wizard. It is a Next, Next, Next install experience that allows you to install and configure TFS in about 20 minutes or less (assuming .NET and SQL Express are already on your computer – a little longer if TFS has to install them for you). Both will already be there if you’ve installed VS 2010. The Basic wizard will install and configure IIS (if it’s not already there), install and configure SQL Express (if it’s not already there), and install and configure TFS. The only thing that really pains me is installing .NET 4.0 requires a reboot :(. Here are screenshots of the entire installation experience:

And that’s it – TFS is installed and ready to use. There’s a similarly (but not quite as) easy wizard for configuring a build server on the same machine…

All of this gives you a development system with Version Control, Bug tracking and build automation (making continuous integration a snap!). What it lacks from Standard TFS is Sharepoint and Reporting capabilities. The great thing though is that TFS "Basic” IS TFS so as your needs grow you can reconfigure it to add more capabilities.

It’s a really exciting development and I hope you really like it. I encourage you to get TFS 2010 Beta 2 when it is available later this fall and give it a try.

As always, feedback is welcome!

Brian

TFS support for Dynamics developers

bharry — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:30:44 GMT

Less than a month ago, Dynamics AX 2009 was released. This new version enables Dynamics developers to store their source code and have an integrated experience for checkout, check in, get and history - the basic version control operations in TFS. I'm excited about this because I get the question fairly often and people are always surprised when I tell them we don't have a solution. Now I don't have to disappoint any longer.

It's great to be able to bring a whole new community of developers into the Team System collaborative development fold. You can get a peek at what is there today by viewing this screencast. I expect future versions of Dynamics AX will integrate additional TFS features.

If you are interested in giving this new combo a try, you can look at this whitepaper for how to set it up: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EFC24EDC-522E-40AA-8F36-6367ED7AB92D&displaylang=en

Let me know what you think,

Brian

TFS & Teamprise for enterprises doing serious cross platform development

bharry — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:04:25 GMT

We recently published a case study with Thomson Reuters on their experiences adoption TFS in a cross platform development team using Teamprise for their Java developers. It's a great testament to how the combination of these two products can work together to create a comprehensive ALM solution for a significant development team. I frequently get asked about how well TFS + Teamprise can meet the needs of a Java development team. I'm really glad to actually have something concrete to point at instead of having to ask you to take my word for it :)

Brian

TechEd 2008 Keynote

bharry — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:43:51 GMT

I just got back from TechEd. I had a great time and met some terrific people. This is the first TechEd where the conference has been split across 2 weeks - the first for developers, the second for IT.

This TechEd has a first for me. I got to do one of the big demos in big keynote with Bill - his last big keynote as full time chairman at Microsoft. One of the things I learned in this exercise is the amount of work that goes into putting this together. The work on the demo, the rehearsals, getting everyone to agree on the talking points, all of the back stage logistics. I'd estimate I spent days preparing for my little 7 minute appearance. It was fun though :)

In my mind (admittedly biased), the demo was terrific. That's not to say my delivery was particularly amazing but rather the demo itself was very good and the technologies we were showing are just amazing. The demo I did basically highlighted two things - the new direction we are headed in architecture tools and modeling and the work we are doing on DBPro extensibility along with the extension IBM is building that enables Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals to give you the same great experience against a DB2 database that you can get against a SQL server database.

The architecture tools we are building are so unbelievably exciting to me that I can't stand it. I'm wishing I'd have had these tools years ago. I can tell you for certain that we could have shaved months off of the development of TFS over the past few years if we had had them.

The thing that has me the most excited is a new feature called a layer diagram. This layer diagram allows you to design the logical layering of your application and specify the dependencies you intend to have. For example, you wouldn't want your client to have a dependency on you data layer in a 3 tier app. You wouldn't want your server business logic taking a dependency on something in the Windows.Forms assembly, etc.

Once you have this logical layering, you can associate the layers with specific assemblies, namespaces or classes in your actual application. Now, the magic happens. VSTS can parse/reverse engineer your code to determine the "actual" dependencies in your application. Having done this, it can compare the actual to the "desired" as specified in the layer diagram and let you know about any problems you have. Going even further, you can configure a checkin policy to validate this on every single checkin. This way you can prevent people from checking in spaghetti architecture in the first place.

It's very hard to communicate an architecture to everyone on the team. It's even harder to prevent them from accidentally violating the architecture. These tools are a huge leap forward in ensuring that you end up with the architecture you designed.

On top of this cool new layer diagram and validation is another feature called the "Architecture Explorer". It is a very handy tool for visualizing the architecture your code implements today. It allows you to graphically browse through your application and its dependencies and understand them. As you update your code, you can see the Architecture Explorer diagrams change.

All of this (and more) represent a pretty big shift in our approach to the VSTS Architecture SKU towards tools that are applicable to a broader set of problem domains and compelling to a larger constituency of users. It catapults the architecture SKU from a moderately interesting overall value to one the the most exciting things in Team System. I can't wait for Rosario to become "go-live dogfoodable" so that we can use this new stuff in our daily jobs.

Brian

Translating Team System Web Access to your langauge

bharry — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:10:00 GMT

We have gotten some requests for translations of Team System Web Access into additional languages (beyond the 9 we already do). I am speculating that the additional interest here comes from the fact that TSWA targets a broader audience beyond the core development team and as such translations are even more valuable than for Visual Studio itself.

We aren't set up to create and test these translations, however, we would like to satisfy the demand. Fortunately, translating TSWA is not a massive undertaking. In all, it only involves translating a few hundred strings. For our own localization effort, we have already separated these strings into separate .resx files that are compiled into satellite assemblies. In short this means that if we give out the .resx files and a relatively short instructional document, it should be reasonably straight forward for you to localize TSWA into any language you choose.

I'd also like to make it possible for you to contribute your translations back to the community for others to use if you choose to do so.

Our thinking is that we will create a CodePlex project for TSWA translations. We will upload all of the .resx files for the 9 languages we currently support and a document explaining how to create and install translations. You can download the files, translate, build, install, test, and use them. If you choose to contribute your translations back to the community, we will provide a way for you to request contributor rights to the CodePlex project and you will be able to upload your translation to CodePlex for others to download.

We're still working through the plans but this is the rough idea. I expect it will take a few weeks to get this all set up - we're still working out the schedule so I'm not sure but I don't think it's going to take a long time.

I hope this will be helpful to you. If you have any thoughts and/or comments, I'd love to hear them. Keep an eye on my blog for further announcements as we get this ready.

Brian

Requirements & Team System

bharry — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:29:36 GMT

Team System is recognized for many of its strengths. One area that I think people often don't grasp the power that Team System brings is in Requirements Management. We don't currently have a product that we sell for the explicit purpose of requirements management but none-the-less can play a central role in a powerful requirements management solution.

Lori Lamkin has written an article on requirements management with Team System. It includes an overview of the problems in requirements management, lists approaches to each phase, talks about what Team System brings to the table and where/which partner products can be used along with their strengths.

It makes for a good read if requirements is something that your development team could do better.

Brian

A new home for Visual Studio Hotfixes

bharry — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:54:18 GMT

We've been publishing hotfixes for general download for a year or so now. Although it has been reasonably popular, it never took off (in terms of publishing or downloads) the way I had hoped. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the advertising/download solution we had was not very conducive to finding what you want. We hope that problem has now been fixed.

Developer Division hotfixes are now being published on the new MSDN Code Gallery site. It gives us the ability to tag hot fixes with key words and for you to refine your search for what you want. I'm hoping it will really boost the usefulness of the service. I am also going to work on increasing the volume and frequency of publishing hotfixes.

The home page of the site looks like:

If you then click on the "Hotfix" link in the dark grey area to the middle right, you will see:

Which is a list of all available hotfixes, including links to the Knowledge Base (KB) articles that describe them. Clicking on "Tags" in the filter area just above the results allows you to further refine the list. For example, clicking on "tfs", yields:

Which lists all of the Team Foundation Server hotfixes that are available.

We are working now on getting all of the TFS 2008 hotfixes posted and I hope they will be available within the next 2 or 3 weeks.

Happy hunting,

Brian

Updates to Team System Web Access

bharry — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:20:26 GMT

A few days ago we released a couple of Community Technology Previews (CTPs) for the next release of Team System Web Access. They include a set of new enhancements for the existing Team System Web Access UI and the promised additional capability to supplement the new TFS 2008 licensing policy that enables limited TFS access for the purpose of "filing a bug" without having a Client Access License (CAL). You can read more about the licensing change in this post. The new feature is tentatively being called "Work Item Web Access" - We'll see if it sticks by the time we ship it :)

You can download the CTPs here:

Download the CTP for TSWA 2008 update

Download the CTP for WIWA 2008

We are targeting releasing both of the updates with our Power Tool release coming this summer. Please don't confuse these with the VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 SP1 release that is also in progress. The development and release cycles for these is completely separate. These are on our Power Tool ship cycle (which is roughly every 3 months).

New features in TSWA

Single instance with multiple languages - A single instance of TSWA now supports multiple languages. By default, the UI language is based on the user's browser settings (accept-language header). The UI language can be overwritten in profile settings. In total, 9 languages are available: ENU, CHS, CHT, DEU, ESN, FRA, ITA, JPN, KOR. Please note that the CTP release doesn’t have all the resources localized completely yet.

Direct links to new work items with initial values - Adding a capability someone similar to the work item templates feature in the TFS Power Tools Visual Studio UI, you can now use links to create new work items and pre-populate fields with specified values. For example,

http://<server>/wi.aspx?pname=MyProject&wit=Bug&[Title]=Bug Bash&[AssignedTo]=Hakan Eskici&[Iteration Path]=MyProject\Iteration2&[FoundIn]=9.0.30304

will open a new work item editor window with the following initial values:

Team Project = MyProject
Work Item Type = Bug
Title = Bug Bash
Assigned To = Hakan Eskici
Iteration Path = MyProject\Iteration2
Found in Build = 9.0.30304

Shelveset viewer - TSWA now enables searching for and displaying the contents of shelvesets. Combined with the TSWA diff viewer, we've found this very useful for code reviews.

A list of shelvesets looks like this...

An individual shelveset looks like...

Improved search support - Now it's even easier to search for work items with the advanced search syntax. Similar to Outlook search syntax, you can reference any work item field by either using the field name, or by using some shortcuts. For example,

northwind a=@me s=resolved t=bug

searches for resolved bugs assigned to me which contain the word "northwind" in the Title or Description.

Share ad-hoc work item queries - Now you can share a work item query with someone with out saving it to a .wiq file and sending it to them for them to import into TFS. Instead, you can encode the query in an url using the TFS work item query language. For example:

/q.aspx?pname=MyProject&wiql=SELECT">http://<server>/q.aspx?pname=MyProject&wiql=SELECT ID, Title, State FROM WorkItems WHERE [Team Project]='MyProject' AND [Work Item Type]='Bug' AND [Found In]='9.0.30304'

You can read more about it and give feedback on Hakan's blog post.

The new Work Item Web Access feature

When we announced the new licensing policy for limited TFS access without a CAL, I promised that we would also be releasing some software to enable users to more easily understand when they are in compliance with the new licensing policy. The new Work Item Web Access feature is the result of that promise. It is a simplified web UI that enables you to create bug reports (or any other work item type), query for work items you have entered and update the status of work items you have entered. The scenario we are attempting to enable is for application end users who would like to report a problem or request an improvement to do so without purchasing a TFS CAL. Ultimately both this feature and the Team System Web Access feature will be integrated into the base Team Foundation Server installation but for now they are Power Tools.

Here's a screen shot of the "home page" for the work item web access feature:

When a work item is viewed or edited, it looks just like as in Team System Web Access...

You can read the spec for this new feature and you can provide feedback on our spec feedback forum.

These are going to be some great additions to our TFS web access capability. We are taking the unusual step of releasing a CTP for a Power Tool release because these tools are so popular and we really want to make sure we get them right before we release them as "official" Power Tool Updates.

Please try them out and let us know what you think.

Brian

First Team System Conference April 22th - 24th in Munich

bharry — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:42:00 GMT

Everything is prepared for the first Team System Conference in Munich, Germany. The conference offers an opportunity to learn about the breadth of the Visual Studio Team System ALM solution, addressing beginners as well as experts.

Customer case studies from well-known companies like ABB, Siemens, Munich Re, Commerzbank … are a focus as well as high level expert talks from Team System “gurus” like Neno Loje and Ognijen Bajic.

Keynotes from Ivar Jacobson and Sam Guckenheimer (Group Product Planner VSTS) round off this conference and will make it a great Team System experience.

Brian

All Team System Web Access Languages are Available!

bharry — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:32:00 GMT

We have now completed shipping all of the localized versions of Team System Web Access. You can now access your Team System data using the Team System Web Access web interface in 9 different languages. Team System Web Access supports popular browsers, including Internet Explorer and FireFox. Because of the broader usage of TSWA well beyond the main dev team, I believe having localized versions is even more important than having localized versions of VS itself. I'm thrilled that we can provide these as part of the VS 2008 product cycle. All of these will work against either a TFS 2005 or a TFS 2008 server.

The newly available downloads are:

Previously available downloads include:

Brian

TeamSpec by Personify Design is Shipping

bharry — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:19:15 GMT

Managing requirements is a hot topic with software development teams these days. I get a lot of questions from people about how to use TFS to manage requirements. When we think about requirements management, we break it into two parts - Elicitation/Capture and Analysis/Traceability. Today TFS really has no feature for elicitation - you can use standard work item entry forms but many business analysts consider that too clunky.

There are many ways to capture requirements. Some people prefer pictures, some to rely mostly on mind maps and some on Word documents. Today a new option for managing TFS requirements as Word documents is available. Personify's TeamSpec product allows you to capture requirements in Word, publish them to TFS and maintain a bi-directional synchronization between the document that people can read and the work items that the team is working on. I've seen a lot of demand for this functionality and expect this tool to be pretty popular. I encourage you to check it out if solving this problem is a priority for you.

You can read more about it on a Personify Design Blog post.

They've also produced some very nice videos you can watch to see the features in action.

Or you can test drive it your self with this trial download.

I look forward to hearing what you think of it.

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 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