Jeff Beehler's Blog : TFS

Resources to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010

jeffbe — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:29:40 GMT

While the various Visual Studio teams are working on our first beta release, I thought I’d point out some important resources to learn more about what we’re doing. First is the new weekly video podcast series known as 10-4. This has been going on for a few months now but I finally figured out where the name came from…I just couldn’t get past the CB phrase that was so popular when I was growing up. I now get that it’s a clever combination of VSTS 2010 and NetFx 4. Duh! I guess I’ve been triaging a few too many bugs recently. :-) Anyway, Brian Keller and crew have done a great job making this information very accessible and interesting along the way. Here’s a quick list of the podcasts posted to date:

10-4 Episode 14: Sentient DSLs

10-4 Episode 13: No More Late Surprises

10-4 Episode 12: Simplifying Your Code With C# 4.0

10-4 Episode 11: Bi-Directional Routing with ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

10-4 Episode 10: Making Web Deployment Easier

10-4 Episode 9: Visual Basic 10

10-4 Episode 8: Pure Client-Side Development with ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

10-4 Episode 7: No More Planning Black Box

10-4 Episode 6: Parallel Extensions

10-4 Episode 5: Code Focused in Visual Studio 2010

10-4 Episode 4: No More Parallel Development Pain

10-4 Episode 3: ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010

10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC

The other recent activity in this space is Brian Harry’s new series on VSTS 2010 which he started this week: Team System 2010 Overview. If you haven’t already subscribed to his blog, I’d certainly recommend it. Brian’s always got interesting things to say.

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

Updated Visual Studio Team System 2008 Trial VPC images available

jeffbe — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:30:22 GMT

For those of you that want to try out Visual Studio Team System 2008 including Team Foundation Server, without having to go through the process of installing the product, we have recently released four VPC and HyperV images for your use. The “all-up” image includes Team Foundation Server, Team Build, Team Explorer, and Team Suite while the TFS “only” version has just Team Foundation Server, Team Build, and Team Explorer.

These images are set to expire on December 31, 2009 (over a year from now) and are a replacement for the original VPC images we released last year.

VPC:

VSTS “all-up” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
TFS “only” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

Hyper-V:

VSTS “all-up” Hyper-V image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
TFS “only” Hyper-V image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

For more information and to find links to the images go to http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/brian/archive/2008/12/24/happy-holidays-and-look-what-santa-s-brought.aspx. Many thanks to Brian Randell for his outstanding work pulling these images together and getting them through the sometimes Byzantine release process here at MS.

Enjoy!

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!

Dealing with the Team System 2010 CTP expiration

jeffbe — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:36:00 GMT

If you’ve been using the Team System 2010 Community Tech Preview VPC, you’ve probably noticed that the instance of Visual Studio within the VPC is getting close to expiring. We expect that it will cease functioning around the end of the year and instead return the message “The evaluation period for Visual Studio Trial Edition has ended”:

Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before we release our next update to Team System 2010 so you’ll need to take action to keep this version working for a while. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy resolution to this problem. It involves turning off the synchronization between the host OS and the VPC. This enables you to set the time in the VPC to a 2008 date while you live in 2009. As you might imagine, Team Foundation Server doesn’t like it much when time goes backwards so you’ll want to make sure that you don’t use the VPC and then set the clock backwards after that point. Ideally, you can use a fresh VPC and disable your clock prior to launching it for the first time.

Disabling the host OS synchronization of the VPC. This is a change to the .VMC file (see below) that basically disables the clock synchronization between the VPC and the host OS. This means that time in the VPC moves forward only when the VPC is being used. As a result, we have essentially 2 months of runtime (not wall time) for the VPC which is way more time than people should need to run the CTP, even if they’re demoing it regularly to others.

Here are the changes necessary for the .VMC file (specific to a particular VPC and not a system-wide setting):

<integration>
    <microsoft>
        <mouse>
            <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
        </mouse>
        <components>
            <host_time_sync>
                <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
            </host_time_sync>
        </components>

Bunch of other stuff that I am skipping over to save space...
    </microsoft>
</integration>

Hopefully this will allow you to have plenty of time to evaluate the CTP and send us feedback on what you like and don’t like about what we put together in this release. As you might imagine, we’re hard at work putting together the next release and your feedback over the next period of time will really help us make sure that the next release is even better than the current CTP. And, yes, we will release both a VPC and native install version of the CTP so that folks will have flexibility in how they deploy and evaluate the next release.

One important note: don’t attempt to join the VPC to a domain since the domain will set the time within the VPC and thus cause Visual Studio to expire.

Many thanks to Brian Keller and his detailed description of the various activation messages associated with the CTP as well as to Virtual PC Guy who provided the original information on how to disable the VPC clock synchronization.

If you’ve converted this VPC image to HyperV following Grant’s instructions, be sure to read Cameron’s update to learn of a similar workaround for HyperV.

Happy CTPing!

Jeff

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.

Guidance Explorer: enabling discovery, composition and consumption of high quality development guidance

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:06:56 GMT

Several of our MVPs just recently “discovered” the Guidance Explorer project run by our very on patterns & practices team even though it’s been released for some time now. Since this was a surprise to many of them, I figured it’d be good mention it more broadly in case others might find it useful. As you hopefully know by now, the p&p team is all about providing guidance to architects and developers interested in learning more about how to apply Microsoft’s technologies to common application development scenarios. They produce a ton of content and often times customers want to customize the organization of that guidance to make it easier to access and navigate. Enter the Guidance Explorer. This Codeplex project provides an easy way to:

Find relevant patterns & practices guidance
Build customized checklists for your development scenarios
Build customized guidelines for your development scenarios
Build custom sets of guidance and share with your team as recommended practice.

Here’s a quick screenshot of the tool:

As you can see, it provides the ability to navigate, search, filter and customize your view on all of p&p’s content. Some of the guidance you might want to navigate with the Guidance Explorer includes:

Check it out and let us know if this works for you!

jeff

Welcome Grant!

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:47:23 GMT

Grant Holliday, a former Team System MVP, recently joined our team focused on adoption of TFS internal to Microsoft. Since he’s a veteran TFS user, he hit the ground running and now is a voracious force on the internal support aliases. I’m happy to see that he’s also started blogging with a similar level of energy. Looks like in the three brief weeks he’s been with us, he’s posted 15 blog entries…that’s 1/work day and he started with a handicap since the first couple days were spent in “New Employee Orientation”. I can remember when that process took < 2 hours but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his blog. I certainly have.

Welcome aboard Grant…it’s great to have you here!

New case study for Team Foundation & Teamprise

jeffbe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:11:19 GMT

We just released a joint case study based on the success that Thomson Reuters has had using Team Foundation Server in conjunction with Teamprise in order to adopt Team System in a mixed development shop. Since the reality of many development teams is that they are dealing with some aspect of mixed development, I expect this to be a very popular case study to read. Sharing a common, integrated source control system and collaboration server across the entire development team is a very powerful tool for teams interested in the successful delivery of great software (aren’t we all?)

Here’s a great quote to whet your appetite:

“Without an integrated toolset, we had bits and pieces of information that simply didn’t mean much or make much sense,” says Mac Noland, Lead Software Configuration Management Engineer at Thomson Reuters. The lack of integration among tools made it difficult for Online Services to manage and report on projects. “Leads want transparency and easy reporting,” explains Noland. “People responsible for writing and quality checking the code want the ability to track history and associate change requests, defects, and bugs with specific lines of code. Lacking a big-picture view and the ability to drill down into the detail, we could not effectively manage the software life cycle.”

Anyway, take a look at the full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002078.

Check out good stuff from TechEd 2008

jeffbe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:44:38 GMT

This was a good week for Team System at TechEd 2008 in Orlando. I would recommend that you check out the TechEd 2008 Online site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/teched/default.aspx) to learn about much of what was covered. In particular, you should check out the BillG keynote in which our very own Brian Harry demonstrated some exciting new features of Rosario (you can even read more about it here). In addition, you should watch the Team System panel when you can watch an interactive session with Brian, Gert Drapers, Neelesh Kamkolkar, Peter Provost, Habib Heydarian and Norman Guadagno.

Enjoy!

Radio TFS

jeffbe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:16:57 GMT

After getting my first Zune in March for my birthday, I’ve really enjoyed getting familiar with the world of podcasting…it’s a great way to extend my learning and entertainment in to my exercise, commuting and yard work time. As it turns out that there’s a podcast out there for the Team System enthusiasts produced by three of our Team System MVPs (Mickey Gousset, Paul Hacker and Martin Woodward). For the past half year they have created a monthly podcast series focused on Team System and Team Foundation Server. The first five are available here:

For those of you that are like me and need to find ways to pack more into your day, I’d recommend adding these casts to your Zune. They’ve even created an RSS feed too help ensure you always have the latest shows.

Happy listening!

Check out Brian the Build Bunny

jeffbe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:13:45 GMT

Martin Woodward, one of our many Team System MVPs, just recently posted a blog article about a project he’s been working on for some time now. Brian is actually a dedicated Nabaztag smart rabbit which reacts to the details of check-ins and builds. I’ve seen teams use stop lights and reader boards to communicate the latest build status but never a Build Bunny. Leave it to Martin to continue pushing the TFS integration envelope.

Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper now available

jeffbe — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:59:30 GMT

Kevin Kelly, a Team System Product Manager, announced today that at long last the Team System 2008 licensing white paper has been published. I’ve lost track of the number of people who have asked about this important update so I’m sure there are many people interested in this announcement. As Kevin says, we continue to simplify this topic and as a result you can expect an update to this whitepaper in August which will include explanations and examples for both Work Item Web Access (WIWA) and the new data synchronization license.

We’re thinking hard about our licensing for upcoming releases at this time. Your feedback on better ways to simplify and communicate our licensing is welcome and timely.

Thanks!

More Rosario specs available

jeffbe — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:18:45 GMT

While I hope many of you are now or soon to be actively using Visual Studio Team System 2008, we’re hard at work with developing our next release known as Rosario. We’ve been publishing specs for some of the new features and just refreshed the list updating or adding 7 specs bringing our full total to lucky 13. Mario Rodriguez posted one on “Enterprise TFS Management” which he describes in greater detail on his blog. As always, we post these to get your feedback which you can share on our spec feedback forum.

Thanks!

March 2008 TFS Power Tools now available

jeffbe — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:35:53 GMT

Check out Brian Harry’s post on the latest release of the increasingly popular (and increasingly valuable), TFS Power Tools. As you can probably tell by the name, we’ve been working on this release for a bit and ran into a few delays along the way. Hopefully you’ll agree that it’s worth waiting for once you take a look at what’s available. At the highest level, here are the key points:

Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls
TFSServerManager client
TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008
Work Item Template improvements Scriptable Team Project creation
Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms
Unshelve to a different branch
Improvements to tfpt review
Delete global lists in the work item tracking system
Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes
Performance improvements in tfpt online

Check it out and let us know what you think!