bharry's WebLog : vsts2010

VS 2010 Beta 2 is Now Available for MSDN Subscriber Download

bharry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:06:00 GMT

This includes:

VS 2010
.NET 4.0
TFS 2010

The VS Beta also includes the features formerly known as Team System role SKUS. Very shortly I’ll be writing a post on the packaging changes we are making to combine and simplify the VS/VSTS products.

MSDN subscribers can download Beta 2 today (It will be available to the rest of the world on Wednesday).

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx

Here’s a picture of your download options on the site.

Brian

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

Oracle database support for Team System database tools is in Beta

bharry — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Quest has released a Beta version of the Oracle DSP to enable Oracle databases to participate in the Team System development world - working offline, refactoring schemas, comparing schema, generating test data and more. The Quest Beta works in concert with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1. For most of the last year we've been working hard to enable 3rd party databases to plug into the Team System tools a first class citizens. It's great to see a provider for such an important database as Oracle begin to come to light.

Check out Terry's blog post for links to the Quest site, videos and more: http://blogs.msdn.com/terryclancy/archive/2009/07/21/quest-release-public-beta-of-project-fuze-the-dsp-for-oracle-database-support-in-vsts-2010.aspx

Brian

Visual Studio Team System 2010 Development Edition: Overview

bharry — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:23:55 GMT

Taking a break from my series on new TFS 2010 features, I thought it would be a good idea to also give a high level overview of what exactly is new in the VSTS 2010 Development edition. This should really give you a flavor for all the cool new stuff we’ve enabled for developers and development teams.

If you haven’t already downloaded the VSTS 2010 beta 1, then check out the download page, as well as Brian Keller’s blog post for step by step instructions on how to quickly download and install VSTS 2010 Beta 1.

First off here’s a list of the major themes that we went after for VSTS 2010 Development edition, I know it’s a long list and each area really talks to a given problem area that we wanted to address in this release.

Say No to “No Repro”
Choose the Right Tests
Prevent Code Defects
Write Faster Code
Same Tool, Different Developers
One Tool to Many Databases

If I could sum up VSTS 2010 Development edition in a few short words, it would really be that we enable developers and development teams to write better, faster code in less time…

Say No to “No Repro”

One of the main problem areas that we really wanted to address in VSTS 2010 Development edition was to reduce the time spent by each developer on trying to reproduce a bug that came in from the test team, business analyst, a customer, or from the production environment. How many times have you been in that situation, where you get into those discussions of “well, it works on my box”, and then you waste the workday back and forth with testers or your support folks, trying to reproduce the issue, so that ultimately you can fix that given defect.

The cost of finding and fixing a code defect increases dramatically as you transition from your development to test, to staging, to production environments. With the introduction of our new historical debugging feature we alleviate that pain by recording what the application was doing during its execution, so that later, we can review that execution in Visual Studio. You can now step back in time, through your debugger, to see what exactly was happening in the application prior to the bug occurring. You will be able to access a call stack from a specific point in time and drill in from there. You will also have access to a larger number of execution points which can also be drilled into, comparing variables, call stacks, etc. to ultimately help find the root cause of the issue without having to actually rerun the application or more specifically reproduce the problem.

John Cunningham’s blog has also of additional details on the new features we’ve enabled for the Historical debugger for VSTS 2010 Beta1.

Choose the Right Tests

How many times have you made a code change and prior to actually checking in that change to your source control system, had to run a slew of test suites, to ensure you have not broken anything elsewhere in the application. With the addition of our new Test Impact Analysis tool, we can now tell you, which specific test cases are impacted by your code changes, to allow you to quickly locate and run the right test cases.

This feature brings tremendous productivity gains to developers by pin-pointing the exact unit tests to run as opposed to having to run the entire suite of tests. It also allows developers to have a quick and easy way to ensure the quality of their code changes prior to checking into their source control systems.

John Cunningham’s blog has a lot of additional details on the new features of the Test Impact Analysis in Beta 1

Prevent Code Defects

In VSTS 2008 Developer Edition Code Analysis (and earlier editions), we enabled developers to analyze/clean their code before it goes out into test, staging or production environments. This really speaks to the value of adding quality into the development lifecycle a lot earlier, which cuts down on time & resources that would have been spent later finding and fixing those issues if they occurred in the test, integration or staging environments.

A common request that we’ve heard from users of Code Analysis, is that we provide a lot of data about defects but they struggle to determine which area to tackle first based on the issues detected. In VSTS 2010, we have introduced a new notion of Code Analysis Rules Sets which helps users to determine which rules they should focus on, based on their project type and the work that they are trying to complete.

So instead of running the whole gamut of rules over the code base, we can scope down to a set of rules that are to be run based on a given task. For example, if users are getting ready to release their app, instead of running all rules, they can run the Release Rule Set instead which is made up of rules that have to be addressed prior to releasing the application(each rule set is customizable according to the development team’s coding standards/requirements). Again this is another productivity gain for developers as they are ensuring quality earlier in the development lifecycle.

Write Faster Code

In VSTS 2010, we’ve added a number of new features to the Profiler, further improving the overall experience of finding and fixing performance issues. In 2010, we have focused on improving the overall UI experience so that users can quickly and easily understand the profiling data, we have added the ability to profile the interactions between the application tier and the data tier as well as profiling client side JavaScript. We have also added the ability to profile multi-threaded applications and examine thread blocking as well as support for profiling on virtual machines (VPC, Hyper-V and VM-Ware)

Same Tool, Different Developers

When the original VSTS 2005 Database Edition was released, it revolutionized the way in which database developers managed their database schemas and really started the journey of modernizing database development. The new database features have been so popular with developers and we’ve found so much overlap between database and development edition customers that we decided to include all of the database development functionality to the development edition.

In VSTS 2010 Development edition, we have combined both editions’ functionality into 1 single edition, with 1 installer, which is available to all VSTS 2010 and VSTS 2010 Development users.

One Tool to Many Databases

In VSTS 2010 Development edition, we built out a very rich extensibility platform (known as a Database Schema Provider) to enable 3^rd parties to extend Visual Studio Team System with offline design, development, testing and change management of non SQL Server databases. At Tech Ed 2008, IBM demoed an early prototype of the DB2 Database Schema Provider integrated into VSTS 2010. And in February of this year, Quest announced that they are building an Oracle DSP to allow Oracle developers to work within VSTS 2010 to manage their database changes right alongside their application changes.

Thanks,

Brian

VS/VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Japanese Beta 1 is available on MSDN

bharry — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:27:09 GMT

Yesterday afternoon we made the Japanese versions of VS/VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 1 available to MSDN subscribers. In a few days we will also make them more broadly available. We’re very interested in any feedback you have.

The MSDN subscriber download center is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=18:370

Brian

VS 2005 support for TFS 2010

bharry — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:11:36 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post talking about some of our TFS 2010 feature set – I’m referring to the one on Admin & Setup. In that post I talked about compatibility and supported dependency versions. One of the things that I mentioned was that we would be supporting VS 2008 clients through an update to the Team Explorer 2008 client and VS 2003 clients (and earlier) through an update to the MSSCCI provider but that, based on an analysis on usage trends, we had decided not to support VS 2005 clients.

I got quite a strong reaction from customers, partners and the field objecting to the lack of VS2005 support. You can read the comments here to get a flavor for some of it.

We’ve listened to the feedback and thought hard about it. We’ve decided to release an update to Team Explorer 2005 so that VS 2005 clients can also work with TFS 2010 servers. Like with VS 2008, the feature set will be reduced compared to VS 2010 clients but core developer functionality will be available. I’d like for the list of support/unsupported features for VS 2005 & VS 2008 to be the same but we are still working through the cost to do this work and have not finalized on a few decisions.

I’ll post about this again within a few months when I can explain the full set of decisions that we’ve made but I wanted you to know that we’ve heard you and are adjusting our plans.

Brian

VS/VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 1 are now publicly available!

bharry — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:39:22 GMT

On Monday we released Beta 1 for MSDN subscribers. Today at 10am PDT, we are making it available to anyone who wants to download it. We’re excited to reach this big milestone in the journey of shipping 2010 and we’re eagerly anticipating your feedback.

The blogosphere is full of posts about the release. You can read about TFS 2010 in my still unfolding series that is a high level overview of all of the TFS 2010 features. The best landing site to learn more about the Beta and download it is here: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 site. You’ll also find links to the forum sites for asking questions and giving feedback.

Here’s a few shortcuts to links you may find useful:
Beta 1 Forums

Beta 1 Connect Site (for bug reporting)

Team Suite – Web installer download

Team Foundation Server download

Lab Management Setup Guide download

Lab Agent download

Test Agent download

We look forward to hearing from you…

Brian

Upgrading a TFS 2008 server to TFS 2010 Beta 1

bharry — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:59:00 GMT

I don't expect too many of you will try this given that this is a Beta 1 release and there's no broad go-live license or support associated with it, but for those of you out there that are interested, I've got some useful information for you. Upgrading a TFS 2008 server to TFS 2010 Beta 1 should work (upgrading TFS 2005 won't work until Beta 2). However, once you've done the upgrade, you still have the old TFS 2008 process template for all of your already created projects. This means that some of the new TFS 2010 features won't work because they rely on changes to the process template or other artifacts in projects that won't be there for upgraded projects.

We've written a blog post on the manual steps you can take to upgrade your existing projects to take advantage of new TFS 2010 features. It's written in the context of the 2008 MSF Agile process template but the basic concepts can be applied regardless of what process template you used to create your projects.

Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/allclark/archive/2009/05/15/enabling-new-features-of-visual-studio-team-system-2010-beta-1-in-upgraded-projects.aspx

Brian

Conchango's SCRUM for Team System support for VSTS 2010

bharry — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:38:00 GMT

Conchango (EMC) is working on an update for their popular SCRUM template for Team System to enhance it for VSTS 2010. You can read about their plans here: http://blogs.conchango.com/stuartpreston/archive/2009/05/19/scrum-for-team-system-v3-0-plans.aspx

Brian

TFS 2010 Project Management

bharry — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:56:00 GMT

This is the second in the set of 3 TFS 2010 feature posts around project management. The first was on Work Item Tracking enhancements. This one is on general project management improvements that I can’t fit into a category :) And the third will be on Reporting improvements – with a focus on report authoring/customization. Again, there are gray areas of overlap so please bear with me.

We’ve made some big strides to improve the TFS project management experience in TFS 2010. Much of it is built on the new work item tracking improvements I talked about in the last post.

Microsoft Project client improvements

We’ve made a number of improvements in the integration between the Microsoft Project client and TFS.

Hierarchy - In the last post, I talked about preserving the hierarchy from Project now that TFS supports hierarchy.
Successor/Predecessor – Now that we have user definable link types, we’ve defined a link type to represent successor/predecessor relationships and round trip them between TFS and project as well.
Rollups – We did work to make the project summary tasks and the calculations that Project does round trip well with TFS.
Undo – You can now use “Undo” to undo changes you make in an MS Project workbook that is bound to TFS. In previous versions undo was disabled due to difficulty coordinating the undo across MS Project and TFS data.

Excel Formula persistence

Excel has some very powerful capabilities for manipulating and presenting data. Formulas, conditional formatting and macros give you an amazing ability to have data quickly and easily tell a story. In the past, you have been limited in your ability to use this power with TFS bound spreadsheets because any customizations you made would be erased when you refreshed the data from TFS. That’s a pretty big impediment to any real investment in customizing the data presentation. In TFS 2010, that changes. We now preserve all of your spreadsheet customizations across refreshes making much more powerful spreadsheets practical. Here’s an example of some cool things you can do with just conditional formatting…

Dashboards

In previous versions of TFS, I have to admit that the Sharepoint portal we created was not as compelling as I’d like. It served as a great place to host a document library and if you invested time in building it out, it could make a great portal but we didn’t provide a lot out of the box. That has all changed in TFS 2010. We’ve really created some nice default portal experiences and focused on making customizing it really easy too. I’ll point out the things I think are really cool and you can look at the screenshot of the default view below to see for yourself…

Layout – As you can see it’s just a nice attractive site layout (as opposed to the old defaults :)). It exposes handy sharepoint features like Wiki Pages (on the left nav bar) and a calendar (important Dates on the right side). You’ll also notice TFS functionality like goto work item in the upper right hand corner. And the “Portals” drop down on the top left allows you to easily navigate to the portals for other Team Projects.

Web Parts – Many of the key pieces of Team System Web Access have been turned into web parts that can be used inside the Sharepoint portal. Down the right hand side you can see the work item summary, Recent Builds and Recent Checkins web parts. In the lower center, you can see a Product Backlog which is a query results web part. You can put as many of them as you like on your portal and each can be bound to different queries and configured for different columns, etc. They also allow easy access to common work item tracking functionality, like adding a new work item, editing an existing work item, etc.

Customization – We’ve focused on making the dashboards much easier to customize. Notice things like the “Site Actions” in the upper right and the “Copy Dashboard” button to create a new copy of the current dashboard to begin customizing. Lastly and definitely not least, notice the “My Dashboard” under Dashboards on the left. By default, we create a dashboard that is designed to be customized by each user to show the information that they care most about. Of course, this is built on top of standard Sharepoint personalization services. I’ve included a screen shot of the default “My Dashboard” after the default Project Dashboard below.

Team System Web Access integration – In 2010 Team System Web Access still exists and has been fully integrated into the product. You will notice the Web Access link on the left navigation panel. That link takes you to Team System Web Access. Although much of the TSWA functionality is now available as web parts in Sharepoint, not all of it is. Further, we’ve gotten feedback from a segment of our audience that they prefer a non-Sharepoint based web access method for some of their users. What we end up doing with this duality long term is still up in the air but for now both are continuing forward.

I apologize that the charts have no data in them but I pulled this off my server and I haven’t had a chance to populate it with enough real looking data.

My Dashboard…

One last point on customization – All of the web parts (in both dashboards) can be customized extensively. I’m not going to show them all, you can experiment with that yourself, but here is an example of what some of the customization properties for the “Recent Builds” web part look like…

And, if all that wasn’t cool enough … If you use Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) instead of just plain Sharepoint, the overall experience is even better! When TFS creates a Sharepoint portal for a Team Project, it detects whether you have configured it against plain Sharepoint or MOSS. If it’s MOSS, TFS installs a richer portal (because there’s some great MOSS features that we can easily take advantage of). Here are some of the key advantages of the MOSS dashboards and some screenshots to go with them…

More dashboards – The first thing to note is that there are 4 dashboards (Work Progress, Product Quality, Test Progress and Build Quality) rather than the one Project dashboard. Why? Because MOSS allows us to use Excel Services to author reports and Excel Services is soooo much easier for writing reports that we are more productive with it and can provide more detailed dashboards.

KPIs – You can see on the upper right an additional KPIs web part that enables you to define and track key metrics for your project.

Customization – Oh, did I mention Excel Services? It’s really nice. In addition to allowing us to provide you more dashboards, it makes customizing them much easier for you too.

Product Quality

And I don’t have a screen shot of the Build Quality dashboard handy so you will have to install it to see it yourself :)

Please note we are still doing some refining of these dashboards so this may not be exactly how they look when we ship.

Agile workbooks

SCRUM has become an increasingly popular Agile project management approach and as it has grown, we’ve gotten feedback from customers that they’d like a more direct way to deal with TFS using SCRUM. Enter the Agile workbooks. While not tied directly to SCRUM, they are very close and can be used for a variety of iterative planning techniques. The Agile workbooks are made up of two Excel workbooks called “Product Backlog” and “Iteration Backlog”. As you might guess, the product backlog workbook is designed to help you manage your overall product back log and plan. The iteration backlog workbook is designed to help you plan and manage an iteration.

What I’m going to show you here is actually not quite what you are going to see if you download and install Beta 1. After Beta 1 was locked down, we did a usability study on the workbooks and found a number of ways they could be improved to make them easier to use and understand. So what I’m showing you is pretty close to what the workbooks will look like for Beta 2 and RTM. Sorry about that but given these blog posts tend to live quite a long time, I’m going to optimize for the final result rather than the current Beta 1 deliverable. However, many/most of the concepts still apply to what is in Beta 1 it’s just organized better.

If you install TFS 2010, you will find the Agile workbooks in the project portal's document library under Shared Documents and the Iteration 1 sub folder. You will also find templates under Samples and Templates\Project Management.

Let’s start with the Product Backlog. It has 3 tabs in it:

Product Backlog for the list of user stories/scenarios on the backlog.

Iteration Planning for a high level view of your project’s iterations.

Interruptions to capture holidays and other notable project wide interruptions.

The second workbook is the Iteration Planning workbook and has 5 tabs:

Iteration Backlog helps you manage the list of work remaining and pick off work to be done in this iteration.

Settings sets properties of the iteration you are planning.

Interruptions captures the planned interruptions (but this time at the individual team member level).

Capacity helps you manage the capacity of both individuals and the team as a whole. This will help you a great deal with load balancing.

Burndown helps you visualize progress on the iteration.

We think the Agile workbooks will be a great solution for people who want very simple, very light weight iteration based project planning and management.

Updated MSF Agile Template

This release will be bringing a MAJOR rev of the MSF Agile Process template. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the last couple of years on how we could improve it and we’ve taken it to heart. Here’s some of the things we’ve done:

Terminology – In general, we have adopted common Agile community terminology (Backlog, User Story, Story Points, etc) and moved away from Microsoftish terminology. Of course the Agile community is broad and diverse so even there, there isn’t always consistency. In general, we tended towards SCRUM terminology.

Simplification – We’ve simplified the work item forms, focusing more on the stuff that is immediately relevant. We’ve eliminated fields people didn’t care much about. We’ve also eliminated some work item types that the Agile community doesn’t make much use of: Risk and Quality of Service Requirement.

Scenario –> User Story – We’ve moved to the Agile User Story model, including tracking User Story size as “Story Points”.

Hierarchy – Added hierarchical relationships so that User Stories can be decomposed into tasks and tasks can be decomposed into subtasks.

Improved reports – Reports are much nicer. See the section below on Reports. In particular, we added the burn down report that everyone has been asking for.

Testing support – We’ve added the new Team System testing tools as first class support. The process template contains a Test Case work item type and other features to enable great integration.

Guidance rewrite – We’re really taking a crack at improving the guidance. We’ve engaged some of the experts in the Agile community (like Jeff Sutherland and Mitch Lacey) to help us create some guidance that will really speak to Agile practitioners. The new guidance won’t show up until Beta 2 though.

Here’s some high level screenshots of some of the new work item forms:

User Story:

Task:

Bug:

Updated MSF CMMI Template

Where as the Agile template is getting a major overhaul, the CMMI template is getting more of a facelift. None of the CMMI changes that I mention here will be available until Beta 2 (we’re just finishing them right now). Most of the work going into the CMMI template is to update it to use the new Team System features. Here’s a picture of the new CMMI information model and the supported relationship types.

In addition to that:

CMMI 1.2 compliance – We’ve updated the guidance to support CMMI 1.2 compliance (the old version was 1.1 compliant).

Two new requirement types – We’ve added Business Objective and Feature to the existing set of requirement types.

Improved reports – We’ve made the reports much nicer. See the section below on Reports.

New Reports

We’ve made a big investment in reporting in this release. Although my whole next post is going to be about reporting (mostly how much better we made it to author/customize reports), this post will touch on the new reports that we’ve built for you. There’s way too many of them for me to show them all here, so you’ll need to try it out yourself to see them all. However there are few high level points to make:

Much more attractive and powerful – Taking a dependency on SQL 2008 allowed us to leverage the new reporting capabilities there. The result is reports that are much more visually attractive and can represent much more complex data relationships.

Self explanatory – We put a lot more content into the reports to help you understand what the report is intended to tell you, what data you are looking at and generally give much better context for interpreting the report.

New Excel reports – For the first time, some of our reports are authored as Excel workbooks. If you use MOSS for your portal, you can host them there, otherwise people can open them in Excel. The primary advantage of this is that although they are a bit less powerful than Reporting Services, they are much easier to customize.

Just to give you a view of all the reports we’ve included, here are some screenshots of them in Team Explorer:

Just as a teaser, I’ll include a few reports here for you to see and then you can check out the rest yourself…

Stories Overview:

Burndown (in Excel):

Bug Status:

Bug Status (in Excel):

Conclusion

Well, that turned out to be even longer than I expected. There’s so much new project management stuff it’s amazing. The 2010 release is really going to make TFS the premier tool for managing software development projects. And in partnership with MS Project and Project Server the set of tools can tackle just about any scope of project management.

Brian

Issues installing 2010 Beta 1

bharry — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:10:00 GMT

As with every Beta release, there are a set of gotchas that you have to look out for when installing. My primary guidance is to read the readme file. Lots of stuff we know about is in there. I'll call out a few things here as I see them become stumbling blocks for people. I'll append to this post as I learn more.

Installing VS/VSTS on Windows 7 RC and Windows 2008 R2 RC - The client products include SQL 2008 Express. It does not install work properly on Windows 7 & R2. The installation will go OK but will result in an error message, however, it won't run after being installed. You must update it with SQL 2008 Express SP1. The readme has more information on this. You can also checkout this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/dstfs/archive/2009/05/15/installing-tfs-2010-on-windows-server-2008-r2-rc.aspx

Don't run initial TFS configuration from the MMC console - There is a bug in the TFS configuration logic that will cause TFS's configuration of Sharepoint to fail if you do. You have two choices - 1) continue with configuration directly from the install wizard (by leaving the "launch configuration" checkbox checked or 2) launching configuration from the command line using "%programfiles%\Microsoft team foundation server 10.0\tools\tfsmgmt.exe" configure You can read more in Buck's post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2009/05/18/tfs-2010-beta-1-don-t-run-initial-configuration-from-the-administration-console-mmc.aspx

Installing TFS on Windows 2008 R2 RC - This issue combines the first two in an interesting way. Only Sharepoint SP2 will install on Windows 2008 R2. However, the TFS Beta ships with an early Sharepoint build, so a straight forward install on R2 will fail. You have two options: 1) Install Sharepoint first and then install TFS or 2) Stop after the install wizard and before the configure wizard and update the Sharepoint installer to the SP2 installer and then proceed with the configuration. But wait, you say. Didn't I just say that stopping after the install phase was bad? Yes, I did. If you choose this route, you will need to take option 2 above and run the config tool from the command line. I will update this post with a link to specific instructions for this procedure as soon as I have one.

Those are the issues I've seen so far. I'll let you know as I see more.

Thanks,

Brian

VS/VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 1 is Available!

bharry — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:41:29 GMT

Today at 10:00am PST, the Beta 1 download for Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Team System 2010 and .NET 4.0 is available to MSDN subscribers. It will be available to the general public on Wednesday. MSDN subscribers can download it from the MSDN subscriber download site using this link. I’ll post the public links for non-MSDN subscribers on Wednesday.

It’s been a long time in the making. We’ve shipped several CTPs along the way. But the Beta is finally here. I’ve started a series of posts on VSTS/TFS 2010 features and will continue it until I’ve covered, at least, all of the TFS 2010 features with a reasonable summary. It will probably take me another couple of weeks to complete the series. You will be able to use my posts as a high level guide to checkout the new features.

It’s exciting for us to hit this important milestone. It represents the culmination of a ton of work. We’re not quite done yet but we’ve crossed the hump and are on the downhill slope. This Beta is not 100% feature complete but it’s probably about 90% complete. The remaining feature work is getting rounded out right now and will be available for Beta 2. The other big work we have ahead of us is the remaining performance work to ensure that the 2010 release is snappy and productive.

This Beta release is really for evaluation only and does not come with a “go-live” license. We won’t be supporting it for production use and upgrading assets from Beta 1 to Beta 2 will likely have some hiccups. However, we really hope you will give it a try and give us all your feedback on what we need to do to make this is truly great release for you.

As always, I’m happy to take feedback on my blog but don’t forget about http://connect.microsoft.com for bug reports and visit our forums for general Q & A and discussions.

TFS Forum

Team System Forum

And you can find more information here:

Visual Studio: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151797
Visual Studio Team System: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=151798
.NET Framework: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=151799

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you,

Brian

TFS 2010 Work Item Tracking

bharry — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:53:00 GMT

In my last 2010 post, I covered Setup, Admin & Ops. In this post I’m going to cover work item tracking features. The truth, however, is that the lines between the next 3 posts are going to be pretty blurry. I’ve tried to think about ways to partition it but Work Item Tracking, Project Management and Reporting are all heavily interrelated. I considered writing a single post for them but then it would be 30 pages or something silly. So, I’m going to break them up but bear with me on the rough edges.

Hierarchical work items

Perhaps the banner feature in TFS 2010 is the ability to break down work items into hierarchies. The most common use for this is task decomposition – breaking high level tasks down into sub-tasks and those down into further sub-tasks, etc. However, I expect people will get very creative with what they want to arrange hierarchically. Prior to 2010, you can associate work items with “related” links and do some reporting around that but easily managing them as a hierarchy was not possible. Here’s a screenshot of a totally hypothetical project I’ve made up. Things to note…

There’s a combo box at the top of the query editor called “Type of Query” and it is set to Tree of Work Items.
The icon next to “Open Tasks” in the Team Explorer shows multiple indicate that this is a tree query.
The results list shows the title indented following the hierarchy and allows for expanding and collapsing the results.
You can’t see this, but rearranging your hierarchy is as simple as dragging and dropping one work item on another.

You can see right click menu items for the obvious things you’d like to do, add a new child, outdent, indent, etc.

Microsoft Excel integration has also been enhanced to support work item hierarchies as well… As you can see, we use multiple “Title” columns to represent the hierarchy level in Excel. You can also see some of the new Tree features in the ribbon.

And lastly, the hierarchy round trips with Microsoft Project as well… As you can see here, Project can also be used as a roll up engine to compute rolled up schedule numbers. In previous versions of TFS, the project hierarchy was only persisted in the MS Project file so TFS users couldn’t see the hierarchical relationships.

Custom link types

We have added the ability to define custom link types in TFS 2010. In previous version there was really only one work item to work item link type called “related”. Now you can define your own link types that can be used in querying and reporting (see more on querying in the next section). As an example, as part of the new TFS base process templates, we’ve added a link type called Tests/Tested By. It is defined to relate a test case and a user story and identifies the set of test cases for a user story. However, you can define your own with whatever semantics you choose.

When you create a link type, you can define one of 4 link “topologies”:

Network – Much like our existing “related” links. Any two items can be connected and the link has the same name at both ends.
Tree – A hierarchical link type that defines a “parent/child” relationship. A parent can have many children but a child can only have one parent of a given tree link type.
Dependency – A directed graph where links connect work items but there can’t be a cycle.
Directed network – kind of a half way type between network and dependency. There are no constraints on what or how many work items can be related but each end of the link has a unique name (e.g. Tests & Tested By)

Link Queries

Now that we have custom link types you can do some very cool stuff with traceability. The reporting system always allowed you to report on links but now you can filter by link type and Team Explorer and Team System Web Access also enable querying on links. So using the test case tests user story link I mentioned above, here’s a sample query in Team Explorer. Notice that the Type of Query combo now says Work Items and Direct Links. Also, notice that the query definition has a lot more filters. Following the grid that selects User Stories, there’s another grid that selects how you want to filter what the matched user stories are linked to (Test Cases that are not closed, in this example). In the linking filters you have 3 main options:

Return all top level work items – shows all work items that match the first grid control and then and matching linked work items.
Only return items that have the specified links – shows the same results minus any work items matching the first grid that have no related work items matching the second grid.
Only return items that do not have the specified links – shows only items that match the first grid but have no linked work items matching the second grid – for example, if I wanted to see user stories that had no test cases associated with them.

And finally, you can filter by one or more link types. You can see by my query results that my sample project has 3 user stories, 2 of which each have one test case.

And, of course, all of this works in Web Access as well, but just to prove it, a picture is worth a thousand words…

New links control

Now that relationships between work items are playing a more first class role in the system it seems obvious you are going to want to do more with them on the work item form itself… enter the new work item form links control. Here are the characteristics of it:

You can have as many links controls on your form as you like.
Each links control can be separately filtered.
The links control can be configured to pull fields from the target work item and render them in columns so you don’t have to open the target work items to see anything about it.
The “Add” button that adds new linked work items can be filtered to a set of link types to save mouse clicks.
The linked items can easily be opened in Excel.
And probably a few other things I’m forgetting.

So on with a screenshot. Here’s an example of the Test Cases tab on a User Story work item.

Other new work item controls and improvements

There are a bunch of other work item control improvements in addition to the links control. They include:

HTML control – You can now have a work item control that renders HTML from a configured URL. This is going to make it much easier to host external content in a work item form. In some cases, it will replace the need to build custom work item controls.
Link Labels – Labels on a work item form can now be configured to be clickable and will invoke a browser to display the results of an url.
Edit controls - Edit controls now have adjacent toolbars that enable rich editing (fonts, colors, bold, italic, etc). Edit controls will also now automatically convert a typed url into a clickable link.
Labels – You can now have simple stand alone labels if you want to just put text on a form without an associated input field.

Field comparison queries

In previous versions of TFS, work item query clauses could only compare a field against a constant. In 2010, they can now compare fields with each other. So, for example, if I wanted to find all tasks where the Completed Work is greater than the Original Estimate, I could do this… I suspect you’ll be able to think of lots of novel ways to use this. We ran across the requirement when building our Project Server integration and try to find a way to easily identify work items where the project manager rejected cost changes made by the developer.

Group membership queries

It’s now possible to easily write queries that filter by groups of people. TFS has always had the ability to synchronize with Active Directory to import group information. Now you can write queries that enable you to easily filter by group membership. For example, I could write a query to find all work assigned to “My team” like this…

Query Folders

The more powerful we make queries, the more of them you want to have – and that means you are going to need a way to organize them. Also we’ve gotten a lot of feedback that people would like a better way to publish queries without having to be a Project Administrator (you have to be to save a Team Query in TFS 2008 and before). We solved both problems with a new feature called query folders. This allows you to organize your queries into folders both under My Queries and under Team Queries. Further, under Team Queries, you can delegate permissions to the sub folders to whomever you like. In the screenshot below you can see a query structure I’ve created a the security dialog where I’ve granted the Contributors group permission to contribute queries to the Web Team folder. I know this is going to be a VERY popular feature internally where we get dozens, if not hundreds, of queries people want to share.

Usability improvements

We’ve made a number of small work item tracking usability improvements. I don’t think I can even remember them all but I’ll mention a few.

We’ve added several controls to improve your options for managing layout for your work item tracking windows. Looking at this screenshot, you will see 4 small controls on the right hand side of the splitter bar between the results list and the work item form. The first two switch back and forth between a horizontal split and a vertical split.

like this…

The second two make it simple to “maximize” either the work item form or the results list, like…

or this…

Further, you’ll notice the new Next and Previous buttons – makes navigating through the list of work items possible when looking at a maximized work item form as in the last screenshot.

Another nice enhancement is the ability to drag an email message from Outlook into the work item attachments list and automatically attach the .msg file for tracking email conversations along with work items.

WIT Categories

We've heard a lot of feedback on the difficulty of making our reports work and writing new reports in the face of significant work item tracking customization. One of the features we have added to simplify this is something called "Categories". You can mark work item types as being in a Category and then write your reports against the category rather than the work item type name. This is particularly useful as you classify work with increasing precision. For example, you might have separate User Story and Quality of Service requirement work item types. They have different data models for a reason but you want to easily write reports against all "requirements". You can tag them with the same Category and write reports against that. Then the report will pick up both work item types. This also enables you to rename work item types, etc and still have tools work by referring to the category.

Conclusion

Whew, OK, that’s it for work item tracking. It’s a lot of stuff and there’s a lot more left for me to talk about. Once you get Beta 1, you can start to play with all of this and I’m eager to hear your feedback.

Brian