Say what? Microsoft Malaysia One ISV Technology Blog : VSTS

Cloaking in TFS

hoongfai — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:09:43 GMT

In the past couple of days, I've been delving into prescriptive architecture guidance for Team Foundation Server (TFS). Along the way I learnt something new, something I never knew existed in TFS. It's called cloaking. Allow me to quote the following text from the Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server prescriptive architecture guidance (search under Chapter 4):

Cloaking

You can use cloaking as a performance optimization when you want to prevent a part of the source control tree from being retrieved. The following are typical scenarios for using cloaking:
• You want to build the project locally and a folder is not needed for the build, for example a documentation folder.
• You are part of a large team project and you only want to retrieve part of the project.

For either of the above scenarios you can cloak folders to stop the client retrieving those folders. You cloak folders on the client by editing the workspace and changing the status of the working folder from active to cloak.

Keep the following recommendations in mind when you cloak:
• Do not cloak individual files. This is likely lead to maintenance problems later in the project.
• For a large project, map out the root folder and cloak sub folders rather than creating multiple workspaces for the project.

Having said that, I went ahead to put this to practice on Visual Studio TFS 2008. Before I got started, I paid close attention to the statement that says, "You cloak folders on the client by editing the workspace and changing the status of the working folder from active to cloak.".

The question that begs is "What is a Workspace?".

Workspaces Explained
A TFS workspace is a client-side copy of the files and folders in TFS source control. A workspace maps source control folders to local file system directories. When you make changes to files within the workspace on your local computer, the local changes, referred to as pending changes, are isolated in your workspace until you check them into the server as an atomic unit. The collective set of changes, checked in as a batch is referred to as a changeset.

As a good measure for practice, I didn't want to edit my existing default workspace, so I created a new workspace. This new workspace will map the source control folders to a new folder in my local file system. These were the steps I took to create a new workspace:

Create a new workspace.
In your Source Control Explorer, go to the Workspaces combo box. Click Workspaces... (as shown in the following diagram)
This brings out Manage Workspaces window.
Click Add.
Then, I mapped the solution folder in my source control to a local folder as shown below.
Since the Doc folder is not required in the building of my solution, I want this folder cloaked. Another reason why I would want the documents folder cloaked is because there may potentially be very large files that I do not want to update from the source control every time I get latest changes.
After I've cloaked the Doc folder, when I get latest version from the source control, it will not get the files under the Doc folder, and the folder appears as grey in the Source Control Explorer.
Done!

Please bear in mind that you can only cloak folders that have a mapped parent. Otherwise you get an error message like the following.

I'm presenting at Softec 08 - Software Testing Conference

hoongfai — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:38:12 GMT

Woo hoo! I get to show off how test-driven development is done, with Microsoft VSTS at the cockpit. In fact that is the exact title of my presentation. I was invited by the Malaysian Software Testing Board to present at its software testing conference. Check out my speaker profile here. My team mate, Poh Sze, will be delivering a 2-hour tutorial on how to use VSTS Test edition at the same conference.

Visual Studio Team System Licensing White Paper

hoongfai — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:36:25 GMT

Visual Studio Team System Licensing White Paper Now Available

This month we published a white paper describing Visual Studio Team System licensing scenarios. It is synchronized with the April 2008 Product Usage Rights (PUR) document.

I'm so relieved that a VSTS licensing white paper is now available. I often field tones of questions from my ISVs about VSTS licensing.

Silent demos

hoongfai — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:52:24 GMT

A couple weeks back, I created a "silent demo" of the testing features in Visual Studio Team System. I haven't quite decided where to host this video, so I put it on my Skydrive. You could access it from my Skydrive public shared folder for VSTS demos. The video was recorded using Office Community Clips, and I find the tool really useful. It captures every interaction you have with your desktop. In my case, it was more than that, I was using it to capture the interaction I have with a VSTS VPC which was running on a remote machine.

My next to-do is to include caption in the video so that my ISVs could also follow through the demo. So far I've already gotten a feedback from one of my ISVs. He said caption, and audio would be good. Let me know what other feedback you may have.

Please bear in mind that I'm not competing with Channel9, or Channel10. I find recording such demo extremely useful for my ISVs. It's also easier for me to scale out to my ISVs when I couldn't always visit them to present a technology-update session.

Wanted: TFS Installer

hoongfai — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:48:46 GMT

I reckon someone could just make a living out of doing TFS installation and deployment. It would be a lucrative job. For the past couple of weeks, I've been neck-deep into TFS and VSTS 2008. It's been an enlightening experience to say the last.

One of the things I learnt the hard way was to do with TFS and the SQL Server collations. One of the pre-requisites to installing TFS 2008 is to install SQL Server. I chose SQL Server 2005 because SS08 has not gone to RTM. I read the installation steps careful enough not to miss out any steps (also learnt this the hard way while installing TFS 2005). But little did I notice how important it is to choose the right collation settings for SQL Server 2005.

It's imperative to know that TFS does not support case sensitive collation settings, nor does it support accent sensitive collation settings. And when you're at the SQL Server installation step of selecting the collation type, pay extra attention. DO NOT select the defaults. Select Latin1_General, case-insensitive, and accent-sensitive. Remember, do not even check any other boxes. There's no turning back is you missed this very important step.

In a later post, I will talk about TFS Build, and also the possibility of introducing a TFS Build proxy that will act as the "load balancer" for all the registered build agents. Until a later post.