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July 2007 - Posts

Monday, July 30, 2007 6:13 PM

Team System Web Access (formerly TeamPlain) power tools release is now available!

[UPDATE 7/31/2007] I've updated the link with the main MSDN page for TSWA. There's also an FAQ now. We have just released Team System Web Access power tool for TFS 2005 ! You can download it now. Team System Web Access (formerly known as TeamPlain) is
Posted by buckh | 1 Comments
Friday, July 27, 2007 12:19 PM

Team Build Compatibility between 2005 and 2008

The following question came up today, and I thought it would be useful to post. One thing I didn't mention was what happens in the upgrade process when you move from a 2005 server to a 2008 server. The 2008 server stores in the database some properties
Posted by buckh | 8 Comments
Friday, July 27, 2007 8:00 AM

TFS 2008: How to check in without triggering a build when using continuous integration

If part of your build process is to check in a file, such as an updated version file, you wouldn't want that checkin to kick off another build. You'd be stuck in an infinite loop. To prevent that problem, simply put the string ***NO_CI*** in the checkin
Posted by buckh | 15 Comments
Thursday, July 26, 2007 6:19 PM

Team Foundation Server 2008 Beta 2: Summary of links to Team Build information

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, including Team Foundation Server 2008, is now available for download . As mentioned in Soma's post , Beta 2, unlike beta 1, includes the "go live" provision in the license, meaning that you can use it in production. We've been
Posted by buckh | 14 Comments
Thursday, July 26, 2007 9:15 AM

Adding Team System Web Access to the mix

A year ago I became the dev lead for Team Build. As of this month, I'm now also the dev lead for Team System Web Access (TSWA), which is the name of the group that resulted from our earlier acquisition of devBiz Solutions , makers of TeamPlain Web Access.
Posted by buckh | 14 Comments
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 11:57 PM

How to build without having the timestamp change on every file in the build's workspace

A question came up a couple of times recently about an issue with the timestamps on the files involved in a build always being the current time. The issue is that folks have customized their deployment process to deploy only files where the timestamps
Posted by buckh | 3 Comments
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 8:00 AM

Visual Studio Team System Chat – August 1, 2007

The next MSDN chat is next Wednesday. I'm going to try to be on the first one. Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers,
Posted by buckh | 0 Comments
Tuesday, July 24, 2007 2:33 PM

TFS 2008: Some properties that you can use to customize your build

Martin Woodward has posted a nice list of properties from Team Build that he has found useful. While some of the properties were also in TFS 2005, quite a few are new for TFS 2008 (aka Orcas). Some of the properties, such as RequestedFor, are properties
Posted by buckh | 3 Comments
Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:39 AM

CodePlex project: TFSBuildLab

Peter Blomqvist and Mathias Olausson have undertaken an ambitious project to provide things like build queuing and continuous integration on top of TFS 2005. While we have these features in TFS 2008, this project provides some of these essential features
Posted by buckh | 3 Comments
Friday, July 20, 2007 10:02 PM

TFS 2008: Build agent configuration options

While some of the build agent properties are available in the VS GUI, buried in the tfsbuildservice.exe.config file are a number of options that control key aspects of the build agent and the build. This file existed in TFS 2005, but it had fewer options.
Posted by buckh | 5 Comments
Thursday, July 19, 2007 11:20 PM

Survey: Which databases should Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals support?

Speaking of VSTS for DB Pros, Brian Keller is taking a survey. If you have an opinion on this, please share it! Survey: Which databases should Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals support? The team who builds Visual Studio Team Edition
Posted by buckh | 5 Comments
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Thursday, July 19, 2007 10:30 PM

Dave McKinstry on building database projects

Dave McKinstry has written a three-part series on building database projects. He includes information on building in TFS Build as well. Part I – Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Part II – Build, Deploy
Posted by buckh | 1 Comments
Thursday, July 19, 2007 9:59 PM

Why can't I create a Team Project called name.com?

Recently this question came up on an internal mailing list. Dennis Habib, a developer on TFS, responded with the following. This is because '.com' is a restricted file type. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) has a list of extensions that it will not accept
Posted by buckh | 1 Comments
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Friday, July 13, 2007 9:27 AM

How to build projects in Team Build that only Visual Studio can build

Aaron has written a great post on using Visual Studio (devenv) from within Team Build as part of the build process. If that sounds strange, it's necessary because there are projects that Visual Studio can build, but msbuild cannot. Projects in this category
Posted by buckh | 9 Comments
Friday, July 13, 2007 9:06 AM

Get: Date and time, read/write vs. read only

Periodically we get the following questions about get. Is there any way to have get set the date and time on a retrieved file to be the last modified date and time from the version control repository rather than the time when it was downloaded? Is there
Posted by buckh | 6 Comments
Saturday, July 07, 2007 11:37 PM

Goodbye to a 200-year old Osage-orange tree

This was a 200-year old Osage-orange tree on what used to be part of my grandfather's farm in Charlotte, NC. This former hay field is now a subdivision (the farm house is directly across the road in the grove of trees in the distance behind the scraper).
Posted by buckh | 2 Comments
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Saturday, July 07, 2007 2:25 PM

Orcas: Unattended installation of the build agent

You can install the build agent (aka Build SKU) without going through the setup UI if you do the following. Thanks to Tony Edwards for this information. Edit the msiproperty.ini. Note that as of Beta 2, the ones that are in there are bogus and are not
Posted by buckh | 1 Comments
Saturday, July 07, 2007 1:56 PM

Keyword expansion in TFS

Periodically, the topic of keyword expansion comes up, which TFS (at least through 2008) does not support. At one point during the v1 product cycle, it was a planned feature and was partially implemented. However, there are lots of challenges to getting
Posted by buckh | 7 Comments
Thursday, July 05, 2007 9:14 PM

How to enable code coverage without a test list

Aaron pointed out this post by Ben Day that talks about using the RunConfigFile property with a build that runs tests without using test lists (.vsmdi files). It all boils down to looking like the following (in Orcas, you would specify the $(OutDir) part
Posted by buckh | 2 Comments
Tuesday, July 03, 2007 2:18 PM

New home for the AssemblyInfo task

The AssemblyInfo task has a new home, because the CodeGallery portion of GoDotNet is being phased out. You can now find it here in the GotDotNet User Samples. The AssemblyInfo task is useful for updating assembly version numbers as part of your build.
Posted by buckh | 1 Comments
Tuesday, July 03, 2007 8:45 AM

MSDN chat with the VSTS (including TFS!) product group is today!

The first chat is at 1:00 PM Eastern time, so I'm planning to be in that one. Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers,
Posted by buckh | 0 Comments
 
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