Clark Sell

Have you ever wanted to *see* the target stack in the TeamBuild targets?  Well the wait is over.  I wish I could say I generated this on the fly but that isn't the case, but one day that will happen.  I intend to keep growing this map as I come across new items and documentation.  If you would like a copy feel free to reach out.

Click on the image below for a larger clickable map.

The amount of VSTS resources  can get very overwhelming.  We have a very strong community with a ton of resources.  Lately I re-found my love for mind maps and decided to create a map around VSTS resources.  I intend to keep growing this map as I come across new items.  If you would like a copy of the map feel free to reach out.

Click on the image below for a the larger clickable map.

Since I am speaking this time, I can't help but self promote can I? Right now I am in the middle of sketching out content and I would love nothing more than to hear from you. While I have a few tricks up the ole sleeve please ping me and share what's on your mind. Now for the official blurb!!

Join us for ROUND 2 of the Chicago Visual Studio Team System User group!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System is the best integrated software development platform to build the mission-critical applications that businesses depend on. It extends Visual Studio's integrated and productive experience from the developer to the entire development team by delivering powerful new role-based tools for software architects, developers, testers and project managers. It also includes an integrated team server and customizable processes to help teams drive predictability, visibility, and control into their software development process. 

Join us each month for new topics including how the different role based editions can help your team to finish your projects on time, on scope and on budget, dive into the many features included in the powerful and robust Team Foundation Server product, or speak to one of the many partners who have extended the platform to enable continuous integration scenarios, integrate into Microsoft outlook, even an Eclipse plug-in! 

Agenda for May 9^th meeting:

6:00pm - 6:30pm Welcome, Introductions and Pizza

6:30pm - 8:30pm Clark Sell Presents MSBuild and CI using TFS

8:30pm - 9:00pm Q&A, Raffle and Wrap Up

Presenter Bio:

Clark Sell is a Senior Consultant and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Ranger for the Financial Services practice of Microsoft Services.   He has 8 years experience as architect, developer, tester, and product manager in the software industry, specifically focused on Financial Services customers and software.  In this capacity, his primary focus is Visual Studio Team System.  Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Clark was a Software Architect at Allstate Insurance Company.  You can read his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/csell. Clark is a graduate of Western Illinois University.

Be sure to bring your Smart card badge from the April meeting to qualify for special prizes! We will be issuing smart cards in May to new members while supplies last.

Date:        Wednesday May 9, 2007
Time:       6:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: Microsoft Corporation
                  77 West Wacker Dr, Suite 2300
                  Chicago, IL 60601

Click here to register.

Enough said.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/

http://www.devbiz.com/

Join us for the maiden voyage of the Chicago Visual Studio Team System User group!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System is the best integrated software development platform to build the mission-critical applications that businesses depend on. It extends Visual Studio's integrated and productive experience from the developer to the entire development team by delivering powerful new role-based tools for software architects, developers, testers and project managers. It also includes an integrated team server and customizable processes to help teams drive predictability, visibility, and control into their software development process.  Join us each month for new topics including how the different role based editions can help your team to finish your projects on time, on scope and on budget, dive into the many features included in the powerful and robust Team Foundation Server product, or speak to one of the many partners who have extended the platform to enable continuous integration scenarios, integrate into Microsoft outlook, even an Eclipse plug-in! 

Agenda for April 11th meeting:

• 6:00pm - 6:30pm Welcome, Introductions and Pizza
• 6:30pm - 8:30pm What is Visual Studio Team System?
• 8:30pm - 9:00pm Q&A, Raffle and Wrap Up

Click here to register

You may also access the registration site at: www.microsoft.com/events and reference Event ID 1032333482

You can read more about Virtual PC 2007, and download it, from the newly updated Virtual PC website.

Some key features of Virtual PC 2007 include:

• Support for x64 Windows as a host operating system
• Support for hardware virtualization support
• Support for Windows Vista as a guest and host operating system 
• Support for PXE network booting of virtual machines
• Support for the use of full screen virtual machines on multi-monitor systems

A long time ago Andrew Connell put together a great article HOWTO: Use Virtual PC's Differencing Disks to your Advantage. If you do anything with Virtual PC make sure you read this. Not only does it save you a great amount of disk space but it will save you a great deal of time when setting up new virtual images.

Team Foundation Server is happy to announce the release of version 1.2 of Team Foundation Power Tools (formerly known as Power Toys).  In this release we've added 2 new command line tools for the developer and 3 non-command line tools.   This version includes some bug fixes to previous Power Tools, support for Vista, and adds the following new functionality:

• Workspace Command (tfpt.exe) - Use the workspace command for additional workspace operations not supported in the currently shipping Team Foundation Server command line (tf.exe).
• Treeclean Command (tfpt.exe) - Use the treeclean command to see and optionally delete files in the current directory and all subdirectories that are not under version control.
• Process Template Editor - A tool to provide UI for authoring work item types and some of the associated Process Template components. 
• Check-in Policy Pack - A set of handy check-in policies to address needs customers have expressed.
• Build Test Tools Task - A tool that allows running unit tests by simply specifying the DLLs or even specifying a file name pattern in TfsBuild.proj, instead of using .vsmdi files to specify tests to run.

Please note that the Process Template Editor has some additional pre-requisites, they are identified on the download page. 

You can locate the Team Foundation Power Tools V1.2 release here and you can get help on the forums for these tools here.

From time to time I am asked where one can get their hands on case studies around VSTS. You can find all VSTS case studies here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/aa718812.aspx. Today we just released two new case studies focused around ROI.

Ever wonder what VSTS books are out there. Well wonder no more. The list is in no particular order:

• Professional Team Foundation Server
• Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System
• Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
• Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System
• Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System 
• Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System  
• Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System Application Development
• Global Outsourcing with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Jeff Beehler and Buck Hodges both decided to tag me and I hear tag backs are not allowed. So it's time to kick off this new year of blogging with a few items you may have never guessed.

1. I have a 10 month old son, Ethan. It's amazing just how fast your life can change.
2. I love Motorsports. While there is number of different leagues, I most enjoy watching NASCAR. A few friends and I try to attend one race a year and so far I have been to Michigan, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis and Indy.
3. Given I love Motorsports you could imagine I also love cars. So much so I am actually doing my own body off restoration on a 1970 Camaro. Yes it's turned into a slow moving project but it's still a great time when I get to turn some wrenches and lay a few welds.
4. I didn't aspire to be a programmer when I went to college. In fact I really didn't aspire to do anything much with computers but I loved the internet. My father was a geek since the dawn of time so I had always grew up around them. At that point in time I would have just rather worked on cars. Once I got into college that quickly changed and I graduated with an IT degree. My first job out of college was actually working on the ole Y2K bug.
5. I am an Eagle Scout.

I am sure these guys don't read my blog but I read theirs. In the spirit of this now you've been tagged too: Kevin Hammond, Richard Turner, Paul Andrew, Keith Brown

As a consultant you find yourself all over the place.  Today I am headed to downtown Chicago via the good ole train.  It's roughly a 1:30 minute ride one way.  I normally travel with at least the following:

• Large cup of Dunkin Donuts ( you know America runs on it )
• 1 Verizon phone with EVDO
• 1 Vista machine, 2 batteries
• 1 set of headphones

Here is where things get very geeky:

I am currently using the phone as a modem.  Blogging, email, IM, banging code all while listening to URGE ( BTW URGE just rocks ).  All at 50 mph!  If that wasn't enough, the code I am working on is hosted on a remote TFS server I am currently checking things in and out of.  CRAZY, I just love it!!

So what does my current bandwidth look like?

Download Speed: 1118 kbps (139.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 119 kbps (14.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

It's pretty crazy how connected we really are today.

That blasted VSMDI file.  Well Buck, Tom and crew did it.  They have finally given us the ability to run tests ( albeit all ) found in an assembly regardless of test lists.  http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2006/11/04/how-to-run-tests-without-test-metadata-files-and-test-lists-vsmdi-files.aspx I am currently integrating this into TfsAlert and will post my findings.

After releasing TfsAlert 0.3.0.0 I realized I'd failed to mention how security works.  BIG OPPS, Sorry!!!  TfsAlert will not get into the business of managing your user account.  Windows already provides such a facility and I believe leveraging that is just a better more secure choice.  However TfsAlert will maintain knowledge about your TfsUserName.  It does so to properly create the Tfs event subscription.  Having said that you still need to properly authenticate just to subscribe, no different than any of the other Tfs tools.

So how do we manage security?  Simple, we just add the server\username \ password into Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Manage User Accounts -> Advanced -> Manage Passwords.  I do realize this may be shut down by a companies GPO but if not we have found this to work very nicely.  If your one of those people ( like I ) who use multiple Tfs servers at a variety of locations you would always be prompted for your credentials just to start up the IDE.  This all goes away once your account is loaded into that Windows facility.

With today's release of TfsAlert a question will no doubt get asked; what really is a Filter Expression?  Short answer, an expression to filter events sent from TFS.

Long answer.

Formally known as Visual Studio Event Filter Language or VSEFL, it feels very much like a SQL expression and/or like WIQL. These filters are added with the creation of the subscription itself.  This becomes really important when you're consuming any part of the TFS eventing system.  Let's use TfsAlert for example.  It's 100% driven by the TFS eventing system and while there are a number of events once can subscribe to lets just focus on two and further provide some concrete examples.

• CheckinEvent
• WorkItemChangedEvent

Lets also assume you have a TFS server which has more than one TFS project and more than one person using it.  Given that when you startup TfsAlert without any subscription filters you're going to get a number of events, some of which I am sure you don't care about.  The following questions usually come next.  How can I

• filter a CheckinEvent for my set of team project(s)?
• filter only WorkItems assigned to me across any TFS project?
• filter WorkItems for my area?

A typical CheckinEvent filter usually looks something like the following:

" TeamProject = 'Project Name' "

" TeamProject MATCH 'Project Name A|Project Name B' "

Those two expression actually answer that first question. The expression simply states we want to filter on TeamProject where the it either = 'Project Name' or MATCH all project which equal Project Name A or Project Name B. The "key" ( in this case TeamProject) is derived from that events schema.  So what operators are available?

Matching is pretty easy and all completed on the server side before the event is ever sent.  What you really need to understand is each particular events schema.  That events schema ultimately defines the actual event and what you have the ability to filter on.  When TFS installs you can find the default schemas @ %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services\v1.0\Transforms.  You can further create your own event types, but I will save that for another post.

This release of TfsAlert will actually publish the message you've received to the event log just so you can easily look at it.  This will really help when you want to build some filter expressions.  This can also be turned off by setting the value attribute from 3 to 0.

<switches>
  <add name="General" value="3" />
</switches>

Want to dive deeper, all the eventing information you ever wanted to know can be found @ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa398965.aspx

Today we have released the initial TfsAlert release 0.3.0.0.

Prerequisites

.NET 3.0 is required since this is built on top of WCF. If you’re running this from Vista you will not need to install the .NET 3.0 framework.

Installation Notes

This version runs under Windows XP.

If you would like to run on Vista you have to install to another location outside of %programFiles% so you the proper security to configure it. We are currently addressing Vista UAC compatibility.

Once installed you HAVE TO properly configure it. This will be fixed in the next release.

• One the following %programfiles%\TfsAlert\TfsAlert.exe.config and set the following items:
• teamFoundationServer, your TFS server
• userId, your user id
• selected, select the events you would like to subscribe to.
• filterExpression, filter placed on that event
• Open port 9999 on your Windows Firewall. This is also configurable if you would like to listen on another port.

What's New

Base architecture with basic event notification.

What's Next

http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItem/List.aspx?ProjectName=TfsAlert

Contact Us

CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=TfsAlert