Brian A White's Blog : Team Foundation

Team Foundation Extensibility Kit

brianwh — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:44:00 GMT

The team foundation extensibility kit is available as of today! This goes with the December CTP release and includes quite a few things. For those of you following the work item extensibility it includes updated specs and updated witimport.exe for creating and modifying your work item types. There is also early documentation on the work item API/object model. Enjoy.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/4/6/5466ad0d-dd6d-4b2e-9402-63352bda1798/VSTF 1204 CTP Extensibility Kit.msi

Who are the team foundation administrators?

brianwh — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 23:43:00 GMT

There are many types of individuals who will perform the oh so glamorous role of team foundation administrator. Who are these individuals who seek such fame and fortune? What are their primary issues and concerns? For team foundation, I have defined three administrator types. Are you one of these people? Do these descriptions ring true to you? What am I missing?

-Brian

• ToolSmith (part-time, part of a software development team)

– Examples: Visual Source Safe, ClearCase Administrator

– Responsibilities: Build mgmt, Integration Mgmt, Informal tool support

– Concerns: migration support (tools to convert data, SCM process/terminology mapping, training users)

– Want: easy deployment, low administrative overhead

– Knowledge: no IIS/SQL knowledge, deep application knowledge

• Group/Department IT (full-time, part of a software development organization)

– Examples: Lab administrators, tools groups, ClearQuest Administrators

– Responsibilities: Maintaining hardware and software systems that support a software development team, formal tools support, internal helpdesk

– Concerns: Server sizing, performance, security model (typically do not have control over the network, domain users/groups, e-mail, internet infrastructure), backup and restore

– Want: low administrative overhead, good performance, control of security independent of corporate IT

– Knowledge: basic IIS/SQL knowledge, basic application knowledge

• Enterprise/Datacenter IT (full-time, part of a corporate IT organization)

– Examples: Corporate IT

– Responsibilities: Maintaining corporate infrastructure, e-mail, network, user accounts

– Concerns: Reliability, availability, performance

– Want: Conformance to existing disaster recovery procedures, conformance to security and software requirements, support for sophisticated deployments (e.g. high availability)

– Knowledge: deep IIS/SQL knowledge, limited application knowledge

SourceGear Building Heterogenous Client for Team Foundation

brianwh — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:58:00 GMT

For all you out there wondering how you are going to support your Unix, Linix, MAC, and yes Eclipse developers if you move to Team Foundation take a gander at Eric Sink's Blog http://software.ericsink.com/entries/allerton.html

Team Foundation Deployment Topologies

brianwh — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:43:00 GMT

I’m going to let the discussions drive my direction for this post. In here I cover Team Foundation Deployment Topologies. Again, I’m interested in your early feedback to help validate our assumptions.

The primary team system server is the Team Foundation Server (TFS) which delivers version control, work item tracking, team build, team project web site, reporting, and project management capabilities. A logical TFS is made up of two components an application server (made up of web services) and a database server (made up primarily SQL Server 2005 databases). The application server and database server can be deployed on one machine or two machines (note: this is not true of the existing December CTP which requires a two machine deployment). In the two machine configuration, one machine is said to be the application tier the other the data tier.

In either case, the machine(s) should be dedicated to team foundation server functionality. That is, they do not serve any other purpose such as mail servers, file servers, or database servers for other applications.

The Team Foundation Server will ship with a version of SQL Server 2005 Standard in-the-box. SQL Server 2005 is a pre-requisite to installing the team foundation data-tier.

Larger enterprises may have investments in other editions of SQL Server 2005 such as Enterprise, DataCenter, or 64-bit editions. Customers may install a single instance of TFS using these editions of SQL Server 2005. The only constraint on V1 will be that TFS installs into the default instance of SQL Server with default database names. We believe most folks can live with this limitation.

Team foundation servers will operate properly on a Virtual PC or Virtual Server. This configuration is not recommended for production environments, but will be primarily used in testing, evaluation, or demonstration scenarios.

Unsupported Deployment Topologies

• NLDB clustering for the application tier

• Splitting application tier web services across separate machines

• Multiple TFS instances on the same physical machine

• Storing individual TF databases on separate database machines

Next post - Authentication and Authorization Model

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Visual Studio Team System Operating System Requirements

brianwh — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 23:57:00 GMT

This is a continuation of my post Using Blogs to Drive Product Direction and is an experiment in getting customer feedback on product decisions through blogs. I’d like you to keep two things in mind. 1) Anything I post here is likely to change before we ship. 2) Please provide some context for your feedback, the reason why you, your clients, and/or your company feel a change is important.

In this post, we will deal with Visual Studio Team System Operating System Requirements. I am assuming you are already familiar with Visual Studio Team System, if not start here.

Client Side

Visual Studio Team System Clients will run on the following operating systems and require the following service packs:

Windows 2000 (SP4 or greater)

Windows XP Home (SP2 or greater)

Windows XP Professional (SP2 or greater)

Windows Server 2003 (RTM or greater)

Windows Server 2003 64-bit (SP1 or greater) (WOW mode only)

Windows XP 64 bit (Second Release, no code name yet) (WOW mode only)

VSTS clients will not be support on Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, or Windows ME.

Server Side

The Team Foundation Server may only be installed on a Windows 2003 operating system. The following table outlines our POR for operating system support. Note: Dates on future releases of Win2k3 are outside my project’s immediate control, more information can be found here.

Versions\Flavors	WebEdition	Standard	Enterprise	Datacenter	64-bit Std	64-bit Ent	64-bit DC
Current RTM	no	yes	Yes	yes	n/a	yes	yes
SP1 (March 2005)	no	yes	Yes	yes	n/a	n/a	n/a
64-bit (1st half 2005)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes	yes	yes
R2 (end of 2005)	no	yes	Yes	yes	Yes	yes	yes

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Using Blogs to Drive Product Direction

brianwh — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 23:21:00 GMT

Part of the job of a program manager is to make the tough calls balancing features, time-to-market, and available resources. Blogging seems to offer the potential for gathering near real-time feedback on trade-offs without conduct a survey, producing a prototype, sending e-mail, or traveling. However, getting feedback through a blog would seem to require two critical things. First, a willingness to share early information and to address the inevitable changes post-blog. Second, your blog needs a readership that is representative of the customer you are targeting otherwise how do you screen the feedback. This seems to be the most challenging hurdle in trying to use blogs to help drive product decisions.

Be that as it may, I will be posting several blogs over the coming weeks that outline the plan of record for Visual Studio Team System deployment requirements. My desire is for you to send me feedback on these requirements before they can’t be changed :-). I’m just as interested in things we could cut as well as add.

To address issue #1, I ask your patience and understanding of the fact that what I post today will not be what we ultimately deliver. To address issue #2, I would ask you give me some background on your company and the reason why any changes you are requesting is important to you, your clients, or your company.

Project Management, Version Control, Work Item Tracking Presentations

brianwh — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:06:00 GMT

Last week I presented at Visual Studio Connections in rainy Las Vegas (Yes, rainy. Sadly, yet not surprising I can also report moderate losses). Several of you asked me for copies of these presentations and thanks to the help of Rob Caron you'll find the presentations (below) downloadable here.

VMS352 - Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Software Project Management
In this session you will learn how to take advantage of the combined power of Visual Studio, the Microsoft Office System, and industry proven practices to successfully manage software projects—from conception to deployment.

VMS355 - Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Enterprise Class Source Control & Work Item Tracking
This session introduces the new Team Foundation Server in Visual Studio 2005, including the new Source Code Control, Work Item Tracking and Team Portal. See how an integrated and extensible server-based system will boost your team’s productivity by significantly streamlining your development processes.

Visual Studio Connections and Visual Studio Team Foundation

brianwh — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 16:47:00 GMT

The Visual Studio Connections conference is being held next week in Las Vegas, NV. There will be overviews and demos of the latest Visual Studio Team Foundation capabilities and other Visual Studio Team System capabilites next. You can find me presenting on:

Monday, November 8

10:45-11:45am VMS352: Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Software Project Management

4:15-5:15pm VMS355: Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Enterprise Class Source Control and Work Item Tracking

You can also also see a complete overview of Visual Studio Team System given by Kevin Kelly

9:30am-10:30am VMS351: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System

If you're there look me up, particularly if you've tried out the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh and have feedback.