TFS Version Control and more ..

A change in our ETM Architecture Plans

2008-05-22T15:58:23Z

As you guys already know we are working on a set of architectural investments that will allow us to scale out the TFS deployment. These scale out capabilities allows administrators to easily manage the load put by their teams on Team Foundation Server while simultaneously reducing the TCO of our offering. Our vision is Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility. We published the details of our plans in a spec located here: Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management

Today I wanted to let you know of a change: Supporting Multiple TFS Instances on one Application Tier (physical machine) has been CUT.

Why you might ask?

Before answering the question, let us look at what Multiple TFS Instances per physical machine (AT node) provides you. In short, it gives you the ability to have multiple TFS Applications or top level websites on one machine given further isolation for the different teams that use the system. For example, I can recycle, make an update, change settings to TeamA without affecting TeamB because they are on different processes. There is also a rolling upgrade scenario that becomes easy once you allow these multiple instances.

Perfect! Now the problem is that you can accomplish this today by using virtualization. Have this machine split into two machines and now you can install TFS in it and have even a greater control on the settings, memory, etc. Essentially we are enabling an already existing and soon to become very hot/popular technology. Given this, we felt that our time and resources were better spent doing other features and leave those scenarios that were enabled to the virtualization technologies.

Any thoughts or complaints please add a comment or just email me directly.

- mario

Team Foundation Server Properties Spec

2008-05-09T17:48:33Z

Yesterday we released our first specification discussing Team Foundation Serve properties and our thoughts on the feature. If you get a chance please go through it and provide us with feedback as it is always important for us to validate our assumptions with customers.

Here are the links:

Directly to the spec: Team Foundation Server Properties

Site that hosts the spec: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb936702.aspx

Please email me or post to the forum your feedback.

- mario

Version Control Areas of Innovation

2008-05-08T19:19:11Z

If you look at Version Control over the 1990’s you are not going to find a lot of innovative and revolutionary features. I believe that there were certain industry factors that were responsible for this "dormant" period, but we won’t talk about those since they are not all that relevant.

On the other hand since the early 2000's or so we are seeing a lot more activity in this space:

· Accurev introduced their TimeSafe® technology and their streams

· We introduced a unified server allowing easy integration between version control, work item, build and user data, and don’t forget shelvesets

· IBM has now followed with an interesting collaborative centered experience in their Jazz product line

· Perforce continues to explore new visual representations of the data stored in version control

· Git is making quite a noise after winning the Ruby on Rails team with their distributed model.

As you can see the next five years are going to be interesting as the ALM space becomes more competitive and a lot more innovative features hit the market. In version control there are three key areas to innovate on (this of course is my humble opinion):

1. Branch and Merge. Because today is too complicated end-to-end

2. Collaboration and Integration. People don’t develop software in isolation; successful teams communicate early and often without fear, and data is accessible and linked no matter where it resides

3. Performance. Because no one likes to wait for information

At the end, whoever can deliver on these successfully will be the “desired” tool of choice. I think we are making heavy investments in each of those areas so again I am very excited about our present and future as a product unit.

Since we are talking about innovation I would encourage you to see the following presentation titled “The Myths of Innovation”, link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc . It gives you a very good perspective on innovation and how much failure and human drive, not book or classes are an integral part of a successful idea. Check it out you will not be disappointed!

- mario

What does TFS merge uses: local or latest?

2008-05-06T22:35:51Z

Recently our team got this question asked through the forums, and since I remember when we were making this decision, I thought it would be best to put it in paper and do a quick blog.

First let’s talk about the scenario: I have a workspace and I have not done a GET in a week or so but I want to merge a parent branch, which I have mapped, to my private branch. The question then is: would merge use my local workspace contents for the source or would it use the latest on the server? In addition, what does it use for the target?

When discussing this model we need to look at the intent of the customer. Do they want to merge the changes they have in their workspace to the target location? After careful analysis the answer to this question comes back as NO. They want to merge the contents of the branch. Since they want to merge the contents in the branch then it makes sense that for Source we always default to use the latest committed version and never pay attention to the contents the user has in their local. Effectively we assume that in a merge operation it never makes sense (unless the user specifies a workspace version range) to utilize the local source versions (which might not be even committed) and merge them to a target.

Summary: Merge uses Latest committed server version for the source of the merge

Now lets look at the target. In this case we need to pend the changes so this requires that you have the target mapped in your local. Going back to the scenario we ask the same question: what does the user wants to accomplish? We get two high level scenarios:

1. The user wants to bring certain changes (cherry pick or a range) from a branch into his local stabilize those changes and then integrate with whatever is latest

2. The user wants to do a catch up merge and is not interested in doing any integration with their local changes

On both of these cases we need to pend the change and have it reside on the user's local workspace. Due to this "requirement", looking at the server version is not ideal because we can easily put the users target workspace in an inconsistent state since some files will have new server content (participating in the merge) and other ones will not. Updating content for the user without an explicit Get action is always a recipe for disaster if the operation has a tendency to be partial on the items being updated. Keeping people from getting into this dependency mess is the main driver of our decision.

Summary: Merge uses local (workspace version) for the target of the merge

Regardless of this decision we always advice our customers to perform a Get in the target if they are going to be doing a catch up or big merge so they minimize the conflicts at check-in time.

There you have it ... hopefully you can use this information to make better decisions or to train your team in some of the TFS concepts.

- mario

Interesting HBR IdeaCast article

2008-05-01T18:20:32Z

Today I came across this article and I thought to share with you because I think it holds a lot of true for software development teams. I think the notion of always providing value because we are smart or have this certain level of expertise at times is detrimental to the overall success of that idea.

Podcast: http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=1648

Column: http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/goldsmith/2008/01/tips_for_managing_smart_people.html

Also read the comments as some of them are very insightful

Here is my high level take on this:

Speak up if you think the idea is not great. Meaning that if you think the value add of your comment is more than 30-50% of the current idea at that point I think is well worth it
Don't comment or provide extra features just for the sake of doing it. Sometime a "That is great !" is all that is necessary to get that idea to completion and into the customers hand
Foster a collaborative team environment were people feel free to share and collaborate on ideas so you avoid these type of problems (this I think is the most important and also the most difficult to achieve)

External Team Foundation Server Tools

2008-04-28T17:47:40Z

The other day I was in a customer call and I was asked for a list of TFS External tools, I am defining those as any TFS feature or tool that is not included in the packaged product. Although I still don't have a compiled list the best advice I could think of was to give links to the places where this information is available. Here are those links and a bit of information about them:

1. TFS Development Center (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/tfs2008/default.aspx)

This is the main Team Foundation Server site and hence it provides a lot of information about our product, current news and released external tools. You can check out the CodePlex and Downloads sections for the latest releases (e.g. TFS MSSCCI Provider)

2. TFS Power Tools (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/tfs2008/bb980963.aspx)

Our Team Foundation Server Power Tools are a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience. We try to release a new version every three to four months in order to keep with the growing customer demand

3. CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?ProjectSearchText=TFS)

In here just run a query with the keyword TFS or VSTS and you will get a significant number of tools developed by our community.

4. Third Party Tools

Attrice SideKicks (http://www.attrice.info/cm/tfs/index.htm) :Team Foundation Sidekicks is a suite of tools for Microsoft Team Foundation Server administrators and advanced users providing Graphic User Interface for administrative and advanced version control tasks in multi-user TFS environments.

TeamPrise (http://www.teamprise.com/): Teamprise offers a suite of client applications for accessing Team Foundation Server from outside the Visual Studio IDE.

Team System Rocks (http://teamsystemrocks.com/): Community site maintained by some of our MVP's focusing on news and tools. Their files tab contains a list of available tools that customers can utilize.

Personify Design (http://www.personifydesign.com/products/default.aspx): A Team System Partner with two products: TeamLook and TeamSpec

If you know of more links which I have not included here please let me know and I will add them.

- mario

Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management Spec

2008-04-23T23:44:36Z

As you know we are constantly looking at ways to improve our product in order to meet the growing market demands of our customers. Our enterprise customers today are looking to consolidate and usually decide to purchase one server for their teams and create a significant number of team projects in it.

The problem with this approach is that they lose some isolation capabilities (e.g. work item fields showing for all teams, changesets are interleaved across non-related projects) , and hit product limits (i.e. 500 team projects) relatively fast. In addition, management features like backup and restore of a "single team project" together with load balancing capabilities are a challenge in today's architecture.

Team Foundation Server started a series of investments in the TFS 2008 release and we are now planning the next major revision of the architecture by focusing on a set of server framework services/components, encapsulation concepts and deployment/management tools that addressed the core market problems.

Our vision aligns with the Microsoft’s Promises to IT Professionals and Development Teams and it defines the direction for our current and future investments in the space.

Vision: Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility
Reduce the TCO of deploying, managing, and customizing TFS as an enterprise-wide service so IT departments can focus on delivering new business value

Today we are releasing the first of a series of specifications that have to do with this work. If you get a chance please spent some time reading it and tell us what you think:

Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management

You can find other specs located here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb936702.aspx

If you do not post to our forum please feel free to drop me a line or send your feedback to mariorod@microsoft.com

Feature Design and Simplicity- Part 3

2008-04-22T00:46:43Z

I have gotten some emails by readers about this series so I thought to continue the momentum and talk about the next law: Time.

It is no secret that "Thin is in" with customers and that there is nothing more frustrating and at times upsetting than waiting for an application to do some task. TFS has worked a lot on server performance in order to minimize this wait time for our customers and we continually get better. Just recently, we discover a way to improve unshelve and we think we can get a pretty big boost on performance which has us really excited.

On the other hand, sometimes doing back end work is not enough to improve the perception of time and you really have to spend time on the design to make the experience better for our users. Take for example the branch visualization work that we are doing (specs will be publish soon enough for you guys to enjoy).

In Branch Visualization we try our hardest to remove all of the information we don't need and also minimize the experience to excel at the scenario the user is leveraging the visualization for. This allows us to remain very thin and reduce any wait time the user will experience. In the first phase this is not implemented but our second phase will bring those design elements in. The solution in this case was simple, take the navigation of the branches and marry it with the target selection so the user discovers the answer one at a time, to the best of approximations. That is a lot better than sending the server 20 targets, which you may not need, and waiting for the server to come back with the answers.

Here is a screenshot of what it might look like:

So always remember to optimize for time because at the end "savings in time feel like simplicity" for the end user.

- mario

Slick Design

2008-04-15T15:55:23Z

We Program Managers are always looking for the latest technology, trends and designs that will be enable us to deliver our vision of the feature to our users in its simplest and most powerful form.

I was doing some research on tilt UI and physics UI and I came across this site, which in my opinion is one of the best implemented:

http://www.whitevoid.com/application.html

Now clearly this cannot be used to navigate your source tree, unless it is very small, but you can extract a set of design ideas from it. Let me give you some of the examples that I think make this implementation a good one:

Simplicity - there is no application junk hanging around the site, the content is the UI and nothing distracts you

Color - the background color plus highlight/ illumination centers you on the UI and since it is not static (moving elements) the navigation feel immersing. In regards to colors, I think the color and mood of a UI is one key element of a great looking application

Annotations - The orange callouts (Hot, 20) are a great simple way to get your attention while not distracting from the content. The help content that appears (zoom in, open) are also a great way to tell you what to expect from the click action.

So there you have it, a slick UI with lots of good elements that we can apply to our applications.

Team Foundation Sidekicks 2.1 Release

2008-04-14T15:20:58Z

Hi,

Attrice has released a new version on their Sidekicks which you can now get here: (http://www.attrice.info/downloads).

In addition to bug fixes, there are two big features of note (more details at http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tfsidekicks/archive/2008/04/08/get-team-foundation-sidekicks-2-1.aspx):

· Code review by work item selection

· Integration of Sidekicks into Visual Studio 2005/2008

· View changeset details wherever relevant

Lastly they now provide an undocumented ability to plug in your own Sidekick into VS/application. Send them an email if you want to learn more about it.

Eugene does a great job with these Sidekicks and the majority of the improvements are based on your feedback so if you get a chance check it out and see if there is something in there which your team might get use of.

- mario

Feature Design and Simplicity- Part 2

2008-03-29T03:27:46Z

Yesterday we discussed the first simplicity law: Reduce and went over one example of its use within our feature development.

Today let us talk about the second law: Organize. Organization is a word that I personally dread since I cannot seem to keep my house, my car or my office organized long enough for me to reap the rewards of its simplicity. Last year, I took the Dale Carnegie course and one of my two-minute speeches outlined a plan to get my office organized. The plan included doing something small every day, either throwing a paper out or stacking one of the books, etc. I have to admit that after four months, my office looks a lot better but I think I have one more year before it is truly there. Yes, it takes that much time to organize an 8x10 room.

In software and feature design this law is mainly about asking the question: what goes with what? One of our main organization culprits today is our context menu, which seems to grow with every release. In one hand it makes sense, we got more features, more integration points and the user always wants to have these features accessible; the context menu seems like a perfect place. On the other hand, you end up with a menu with more than 25 options that is almost the entire size of the document window.

How do we balance these two customer needs, how do we embrace simplicity through proper organization? In my opinion the answer lies in combining groups of things that go together (what goes with what?), and/or abstracting things to a higher level in order to combine items or functionality within one concept. A very recent example that combines both of these solutions is the Office Ribbon. Yes I know, you either hate or love the ribbon; but since I am in the love camp, I am going to side with “it was a great solution”, even if you cannot find the Print button at times. The ribbon provides an abstraction by using tabs that speak about the properties or actions of the document and its artifacts. The tab Insert is really an abstraction of all of the functionality that word provides you for this action and inside this tab, you find the groupings by Pages, Tables, Illustrations, etc. Essentially Insert became a first class action in the ribbon.

When applying this concept to TFS and Version Control it results in the abstraction of the branch concept in order to provide a lot more functionality around these objects, which today are just folders. The abstraction will allow users to exercise functionality that before would be scattered across the product, and hence unorganized. In the grouping front, we will be looking at our context menu and rethinking the experience in order to come up with the right groups and user interaction.

Summarizing, use abstraction and grouping effectively to organize the functionality of your design; they can be very powerful!

How TFS proxy Server 2008 works

2008-03-28T03:38:34Z

One of our testers, Amos, posted his first blog post today and it goes a bit deeper into the TFS proxy than our msdn documentation so I thought that it might beneficial to cross reference since our Proxy is so popular in the marketplace.

Here is the link: http://blogs.msdn.com/tsyang/archive/2008/03/24/how-team-foundation-server-proxy-2008-works.aspx

- mario

Feature Design and Simplicity- Part 1

2008-03-27T21:35:00Z

As a Program Manager an integral part of our job is designing a great user experience for our customers. One of the most important factors in the design is simplifying the experience so it is ease to use and easy to implement.

As you know, simplicity is one of those things that is very easy to talk about but extremely hard to achieve. I remember spending a lot of days and nights just thinking of a way that I could bring a given feature to the customer without upsetting him because the prototype had him clicking through three modal UI screens to get the task accomplished. Ok I am exaggerating a little bit here, but seriously, look at our old conflict resolution experience and try to resolve a rename version conflict in less than three clicks, aha you can’t.

In my quest for simplicity I came across John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity and I liked them so much that I wanted to share them with you: (http://lawsofsimplicity.com/category/laws?order=ASC ). Today I will discuss its first law Reduce, in which he states that “the easiest way to simplify a system is to remove functionality”. Wait let’s read that again, to make version control simpler I just have to cut features? Well that does not work too well for me if I want to keep my job. In fact, a big part of it is to make sure that the features our customers want make it into the product and not out of the product. Then, how do we apply this to feature development?

For me, this law is all about the last sentence and specifically the statement “When in doubt, just remove”. At the time I read this law we were designing the new resolve experience (Resolve Spec) and it gave me an opportunity to challenge myself on the features/improvements we were introducing. My approach was simple if I doubted that it provided strong value to the customer then I would remove it and try to come up with another way to integrate the feature. For example, at one time we had in the design a progress indicator that would tell you how far along you were in your conflict resolution. This works great when you are sitting down and resolving all of the conflicts at once without checking in, but the reality is customers not always work this way. They have distractions, they work in waves and at that point we were not able to provide the value we wanted to all of our customers so we just removed it. That was a good decision!

Next time you are sitting at your desk late at night trying to make the design work just follow this rule and challenge all of the functionality presented to the user in that screen. Can you cut anything out and still maintain the value? Ohhh I see some of them that are doubtful, go ahead and cut it, you will fell better at then end and your product will be yes “simpler”.

- mario

Making quality screencast videos

2008-02-25T20:48:32Z

As a Program Manager at Microsoft you are frequently needing to demo your product or feature to various teams and customers. Since there are a lot of people that are always interested, in order to scale the effort, we end up producing videos that we can share so people can se the product in action without our involvement.

The quality of these videos is always important so I wanted to share a resource that we found useful for creating screencasts:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/775-ask-37signals-how-do-you-make-screencast-videos

- mario

TFS Resolve Improvements Spec published

2008-02-01T15:56:55Z

Recently, I have been talking about the improvements we are thinking of making to the resolve experience in our next release. Well, today I am happy to announce that you get to see and provide feedback to us on the complete specification.

You can get a copy of it by going to our spec publishing site:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb936702.aspx

or download it directly using this link:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/0/e/e0ed04ec-bf14-4dd6-b5ad-22094b128498/Resolve-Improvements.xps

Let us know what you think!

- mario