Jeff Beehler's Blog : Rangers

Welcome Willy, our newest Team System Ranger

jeffbe — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:50:11 GMT

I’m pleased to welcome Willy-Peter Schaub to the Team System team as our newest Ranger. Willy is a former Microsoft MVP from South Africa (his old blog can be found here: http://dotnet.org.za/willy/) and has recently joined us to help further the Ranger mission of accelerating the adoption of Team System. He’s started a new blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/) and has already written 16 posts in his brief stint here so far. At this rate he’ll quickly surpass me on quantity and may have already done so on value. As such, I’d highly recommend checking out his new feed. He’s already doing a good job of explaining what the Rangers do (nice hat!), explaining the point behind the software development lifecycle, and pointing folks to nuggets of Ranger goodness. All in under two weeks!

Welcome Willy!

Listen to me on Radio TFS

jeffbe — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:08:55 GMT

The Radio TFS folks called me at home just before the holidays and spent the better part of an hour talking about what I do, some of the history of Team System and where we’re headed with our 2010 release. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s a fun format for getting some of the behind-the-scenes information out to the community. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend perusing their website for other shows that might pique your interest.

Take a listen to our conversation here: Play Now- A Chat with Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff

TFS Branching Guide 2.0 published

jeffbe — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:21:00 GMT

I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but the VSTS Rangers have shipped again! This time, in the form of guidance for branching strategies using Team Foundation Server. You can find this release on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII

Selecting the right branching strategy is one of the most important aspects of TFS deployment. Picking the right strategy can lead to optimized team cooperation, increased productivity and a successful adoption. On the other hand, selecting a bad branching strategy can cause frustration, damage productivity and derail TFS adoption in an organization. We have therefore put a lot of effort in creating a set of practical guidance to educate our customers and partners and support their VSTS adoption efforts.

As the name implies, this is the 2nd version of the TFS Branching Guidance to be published. Since the first release, we have received lots of feedback and change requests. Most feedback indicated a desire for a more practical approach to branching compared to the first release which is more theoretical. With that in mind, we decided to reduce the conceptual part and focus on branching practices with Team Foundation Server.

Here’s an overview:

TFS Branching Guide - Main 2.0

This is the main article which briefly explains branching concepts and introduces 3 levels of the most common branching scenario

TFS Branching Guide - Scenarios 2.0

A collection of less common branching scenarios

TFS Branching Guide - Q&A 2.0

A set of most frequently asked questions with answers

TFS Branching Guide - Drawings 2.0

A set of branching drawings in different formats including a large branching poster

TFS Branching Guide - Labs 2.0

A couple of examples for hands on labs with step by step instruction for practicing the branching scenarios

I’m especially excited about this project as it’s the first VSTS Ranger project to have included significant contributions from our Team System MVPs including Brian Randell, Willy-Peter Schaub, Eugene Zakhareyev and Jeff Levinson. This is a new approach we’re trying out in order to increase the community involvement in our Ranger projects which will hopefully result in improved applicability throughout our user base. Please let us know if you think it’s working!

System Center 2007 Management Pack for TFS 2008 is available!

jeffbe — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:58:31 GMT

The Team System Rangers have delivered again! This time it’s a comprehensive Management Pack for TFS 2008 working with System Center 2007. This release represents an amazing amount of effort and coordination between the Ranger, the TFS product team, the System Center team, Microsoft Consulting Services and a number of early adopting companies. We hope you find it a valuable addition to your arsenal of TFS management tools.

You will find the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28c745b5-28cc-474a-a5fd-944c246d7727&displaylang=en, You can also go to the System Center Operations Manager Catalog and search for it by selecting "System Center Operations Manager 2007" and entering TFS as a keyword.

Overview

The Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 Management Pack monitors exposed services of TFS. This management pack includes event rules and monitors. It is designed to proactively monitor quality and availability of TFS services and even automate recovery in some scenarios.

Feature Summary

Auto discovery of TFS components
Leverages ASP.NET MP and SQL MP
Implements containment hierarchy reflecting logical architecture of the Product
Implements a proper health model using Monitors
Contains tasks, diagnostic and recovery for certain failures
Events indicating service outages
Alerts indicating configuration issues and connected data source changes
Verification that all dependant services are running
Targeted running of BPA against TFS Servers from Operator Console

I want to thank the Team System Rangers for their work in putting this together and getting it shipped. They've done a terrific job delivering add-ons and guidance for Team System over the past few years and this is one more in a long string of accomplishments.

Rangers ship SQL load testing tool

jeffbe — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:37:45 GMT

The Team System Rangers have shipped again! This time they’re have built on the success of the WCF Load Testing Tool and have applied that same approach to SQL. You can find this tool on our Codeplex site: SQL Load Test. Here are the details from that site:

Project Description

This tool takes a SQL Profiler trace file and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of database calls found in the trace file. The unit test is designed to be used in a Visual Studio Load Test. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing. The tool generates code for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. The source code is a Visual Studio 2005 project. The tool is still in pre-release stage of development.

Why Load Test SQL?

There is a lot of code out there that makes load testing the application very difficult. The most common type is a client application that contains direct database calls. The application however is not structured to allow the business logic to be exercised without the GUI. Another common scenario is a legacy application written in a language such as Visual Basic 6. In cases like these, it can be difficult to load test the application without a GUI test tool, which introduces other disadvantages. GUI test tools are notoriously difficult to use, generally lead to brittle tests and also have limitations in scaling the load injectors sufficiently to exercise the servers. This tool offers one possible alternative. You start with using the client application to generate a trace of the SQL statements which typically represent a usage scenario. You can then turn the trace into equivalent ADO.NET code program that can be used in a load test.

Tool Description

The tool generates a Visual Studio 2005/2008 Unit Test from a SQL Server Profiler trace. It extracts all the SQL statements and stored procedure calls from the trace and turns them into a single Visual Studio Unit Test, which can then be configured as a Visual Studio Load Test. The tool does not interact with the database itself when it analyzes the trace and generates the test code. It can therefore be used in “offline” scenarios. The generated code needs to be customized to include a connection string to the database under test. That code also includes hooks to allow the user to customize the parameters that are passed to the SQL statements and stored procedures, so that variability can be introduced into the data to prevent caching from producing artificially high performance figures. The tool is intended to be used in conjunction with a client program that runs against a database. A trace of the client’s SQL Server activity is captured using the SQL Server Profiler. This represents a test scenario, which is then processed by the tool to produce a Unit Test that replays the scenario.

Congratulations to the various Rangers involved in this project! Please check it out and let us know what you think.

Using Team System for SharePoint development

jeffbe — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:25:40 GMT

From all indications, Microsft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) adoption is growing quickly as it provides an easy way to share information, facilitate collaboration, manage content, and implement workflow within enterprises. We use it daily here on our team to store documents, and share project details. We’ve done a bit of customization but I can tell that there are many more capabilities that we have not yet exploited. As customers adopt and customize the platform, they find that they want bring the power of Team System to managing the lifecycle of their sites just like they’ve done for their other application development efforts. To help with this, the Team System Rangers have engaged in an effort to develop guidance around the best practices for SharePoint application development. We plan to publish the guidance in the form of white papers and articles to MSDN.

As we engage on this project, we’d like your feedback on the top topics around leveraging Team Foundation Server (TFS) for MOSS application development. Please review the below list of categories that we’re planning to cover and let us know if we’re hitting the most important ones. Are there any that we’re missing?

Implementing TFS Team Build for SharePoint Development: Customers want to use Team Build to centrally build their SharePoint application projects on demand or on an automatic schedule as well as how to extend Team Build for deployment to target SharePoint farms.
Assembly and Artifact Development Models for SharePoint: Development teams need to reconcile the differences between artifact and assembly development, including combining these two components into a single source control repository such as Team Foundation Server. There are various team and organizational models ensure all artifacts and assembly components of a SharePoint application get packaged for farm deployment as a single unit.
Deploying and Managing SharePoint Solutions: Development teams and administrators need strategies for deploying their application into a target SharePoint environment. Since there are various types of SharePoint applications, there are various strategies and scenarios to consider.
Implementing TFS as an ALM Platform for SharePoint Development: Developers want advice on how to best take advantage of the collaboration capabilities of TFS to increase their ability to stay organized and focused on meeting business requirements.
Leveraging Testing for SharePoint: Customers, given the complexity some of their customized SharePoint applications, want advice on tools and methods needed to test their SharePoint applications and how Team Foundation Server can extend these capabilities.

So, if your team is creating custom applications for SharePoint, we’re hoping that guidance on these topics will be helpful. Please let us know if we’re missing any major areas from your perspective.

Thanks!

Load Test Report Generator now available on Codeplex

jeffbe — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:07:00 GMT

The Team System Rangers have shipped again!

Last Friday, we published our Ranger Load Test Report Generator to Codeplex. We decided to post this to the existing Load Test Reports Codplex site for customer convenience.

The Load Test Report Generator contains a utility and a set of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports that allow users to generate Summary reports, counter comparison reports within and across test runs. The reports are simple but very flexible and can be used to generate & visualize various scenarios that a test team would like to create as a summary report for a set of load test runs.

The tool allows users to author and generate reports in HTML/MHT and Doc formats. It applies a task based approach for creating reports and is based on the feedback received from consultants in professional test labs.

Reports can also be generated using the concept of a template that makes it very easy to reuse predefined reports as templates for new ones. It is very simple to use custom build reports with the tool. All you need to do is publish your custom report in SSRS.

Congratulations to the Team System Rangers for their continued work in accelerating the adoption of Team System by filling the gaps in our current offering.

Project Server 2007 connector refreshed

jeffbe — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:29:27 GMT

I'm happy to announce that the Team System Rangers have just refreshed the Project Server 2007 to TFS connector that was originally released last year. This version has been made compatible with the recent release of TFS 2008. In addition, we've fixed a number of the most commonly reported bugs from the first 6 months of usage by customers. There are some important notices that accompany this release:

If Connector installation fails immediately, it may be due to the fact that the VC++ 9.0 runtime assemblies have not been installed on the machine. This issue was found late in testing; however we did not want to further delay getting the Connector to you. It is only needed for installation and is not needed for the Connector to run. We will be removing this dependency in a minor release (coming soon). For now, you must run the vcredist_x86.exe that is included with the Connector installation file if you run into this issue.
A change that was made to a TFS 2008 API such that the process template information is no longer maintained with a team project. However, the Connector depends on this information to determine how to map fields within a team project to fields within a PS project. Please see http://blogs.msdn.com/lfenster/archive/2008/02/14/getting-a-process-template-for-a-team-project-in-tfs-2008.aspx for a full description of the change and a tool to ensure that your team projects have the necessary information for the Connector to work effectively.

Many thanks to Lenny Fenster for his contributions to this project.

I'm eager to hear how this connector works for you and what additional improvements you think need to be made. You can post your thoughts directly to the project site on Codeplex.

Load testing Windows Communication Foundation applications

jeffbe — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:00:56 GMT

The VSTS Rangers have done it again! They've identified a gap in our current product offering that was blocking it's adoption by a major customer and found a way to deliver tooling to fill the gap. In this case, the challenge at hand was load testing an application that was utilizing the new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), part of the .NET Framework 3.0.

In response, our team wrote a tool which takes a WCF trace file and a WCF client proxy, or a WCF interface contract, and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of calls found in the trace file. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing.

The tool generates code for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. It also installs a wizard into both editions of Visual Studio for creating the trace and processing it from inside Visual Studio. If both editions are present the tool is installed into both editions. The source code is a Visual Studio 2005 project.

Features

The tool has the following main features:

Replay of captured scenario in a unit test that can be included in a load test.
Support for the DataContractSerializer.
Support for message contracts.
Support for proxies generated using svcutil.
Support for clients that create proxies at run time from contract interfaces.
Supports calls to multiple services in a single scenario.
Supports multiple calls to the same service operation.
Filtering by SOAP action of which messages in the trace to replay.
Readable and modifiable code is generated.
Automatic association of trace message with proxy method (requires all operations to have a unique SOAP action).
Support for client and server side traces.
A command line tool for processing traces and generating code.
Visual Studio 2005/2008 integration (Team Developer, Team Test, Team Suite and for 2008 also Professional)) that can be used instead of the command line tool.

You can learn more as well as download the contents from here on the Codeplex site.

Congratulations to the Ranger team for this powerful tool and the resulting customer win. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Woohoo!

TFS-to-TFS migration

jeffbe — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:34:05 GMT

As more and more people are using TFS, we have been hearing requests to help customers migrate Team Projects from one TFS server to another. Several scenarios are common including:

moving a single project from one TFS server to another
consolidating projects from separate TFS servers on to a single server
mirroring elements of a team project between two separate locations

In support of these requests, the Team System Rangers have created a migration utility aptly called the TFS to TFS Migration Tool. We've heavily leveraged the TFS Migration & Synchronization Toolkit along the way (which in itself was a good test of the toolkit). However, it's important to note that this approach has some limitations (which are also outlined on the associated Codeplex site):

This tool is only capable of copying Version Control items and Work Items, and links between them. It does not bring over reports, Team Build history, Sharepoint content, or any of the other portions of a Team Project.
Work Item id's and Changeset id's will always be new in the target project. This can create confusion when folks refer to ID's in bug descriptions and other places. When Linking is leveraged, the ID’s for the new changesets are reflected.
Timestamps will be lost when using this tool, all creation times for work items and version control operation times (add, edit, delete, branch, merge, etc) will reflect the time that the migration was performed. This will effect reports that rely on a time dimension.
Version Control migration is complex. This is just the nature of the beast. When actions are performed in TFS, not all of the information is stored (i.e. the order that changes were pended on a set of items). When the migration tool tries to “replay” these actions, it may not have enough context into the operations that were performed to automate the migration correctly. As a result, some situations with complex sequences of actions may require manual work-arounds before proceeding with the automated migration.

For some related scenarios, there are alternative approaches that you might want to consider evaluating alongside the possibility of using the Migration Tool:

Backup and Restore may be a better option when IDs and timestamps must be preserved. This process is well documented on MSDN.
Upgrading from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008 can be handled by the upgrade functionality in the product, this tool does not need to be used.
If you are looking to move an entire server or a subset, keep in mind that you can do a backup restore, and use the new Team Project Delete functionality in TFS2008 to remove unwanted Team Projects. The new ‘Destroy’ feature can also permanently delete version control items.
For remote site development, consider using Team Foundation Proxy before considering this tool, this functionality works out of the box and is a well worn path.

If these limitations are acceptable to you, I'd certainly recommend investigating this new tool. And if you do, please let us know what you think and how well it works for you.

Brian Harry also wrote a good introduction to this tool if you want to learn more.

Congratulations to the Rangers for another successful release aimed at helping overcome adoption hurdles for Team System.

Woohoo!

Operations Guidance for TFS

jeffbe — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:07:20 GMT

The Team System Rangers have done it again. Their mission is the accelerate adoption of Team System so they're always on the look out for those things that might be blocking customers from deploying and using our tools. Based on repeated customer requests, they've been focused recently on collecting the scattered documentation from various Microsoft sources to provide a single point of entry into the world of TFS Operations as well as our recommended operational best practices. The team working on this project consisted of folks from the product team as well as Microsoft Consulting Services so it reflects both the product expertise as well as the deep customer experience that has become the hallmark of Ranger projects.

Please take a look at this and let us know what you think: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb663036(VS.80).aspx

Watch TFS - Project Server Connector Channel 9 video

jeffbe — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:56:00 GMT

Brian Keller recently interviewed Lenny Fenster, the lead VSTS Ranger on the TFS-Project Server Connector, about the project. If you want to learn more about what we did and why, I'd recommend taking the time to watch this interview.

Upcoming Project Server Connector webcast

jeffbe — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:53:24 GMT

Brian Keller just announced an upcoming webcast entirely focused on the recently released TFS-Project Server Connector scheduled for September 17, 2007. Since we released the initial drop of the connector a little over a month ago, it's gotten quite a bit of attention. We've found and fixed a few bugs and published a v1.1 release a couple weeks ago. If you're interested in getting using TFS and Project Server together, hopefully you can join us for this webcast:

MSDN Webcast: Overview of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server - Project Server 2007 Connector
Monday, September 17, 2007 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)