Srikanth R : Orcas

"Silent" Commandline option for Branching in Orcas

srikanth_r — Mon, 28 May 2007 09:37:28 GMT

Another great feature in Orcas Version control is that there is an option to create a branch without having to download any of the file locally ( i.e without any get operations). This new option is "/silent" argument for the tf branch command and this prevents the get operations and thus doing the braching in a faster way.

Here's the screenshot how it can be used

Cheers !

Comparing performance reports with the Visual Studio Team System Profiler

srikanth_r — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:13:00 GMT

While I was exploring some great features of Orcas I came across this interesting great blog post that describes some new features in the profiler that are now available with Visual Studio Team System "Orcas" beta 1. Here's short desciption from this blog

With the recent release of the first Beta for Visual Studio Team System (codename Orcas) customers will get their first chance to see all the great new features that we are adding to the product. For the profiler in particular we’ve added some very cool new features that I’m really happy to finally be able to reveal publicly

Don't miss to visit this blog and this feature !

New Version Control features in Orcas

srikanth_r — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:28:00 GMT

I am very much excited about the new features of Orcas. I recently blogged about new Code Metrics feature. In this blog I explain the new features of Version Control within Orcas

Destroy- The version control allows the destroy operation that provides administrators with the ability to remove files and folders from the version control system permanently. The destroyed files and folders cannot be recovered once they are destroyed. The Destroy feature will allow administrators to achieve SQL server disk space usage goals without constantly needing to add more disks to the data tier machine. Destroy also facilitates removing versioned file contents that must be permanently removed from the system for any other reason.

Heres the documentation screenshot of how this command can be run This command can only be run by an administrator

Annotate - This was available as Team Foundation Server Microsoft TFS PowerToys already, but now it is part of the product. It gives you a chance to see who made what changes to a file. Annotate is a feature that allows developers to inspect a source code file and see at line-by-line level of detail who last changed each section of code. It brings together changeset data with difference technology to enable developers to quickly learn change history inside a source file.

Folder Diff - Orcas now supports compare operations on folders, whereby the contents of the folder are recursively compared to identify files that differ. Folder diff can compare local folders to local folders, local folders to server folders, and server folders to server folders. It will be really useful to identify differences between branches, files that you’ve changed locally, and files that have changed between two points in time. Check the Folder Difference blog of Tan Phan about the exact differences.

Get Latest on Checkout - This is an optional setting on a team project or on an individual basis, you can have Team Foundation Server always download the latest version of a file when you check it out. This helps ensure that you don’t have to merge your changes with somebody else’s when you check the file back in. This option can also be set at Team Project level by Administrator

There are lot of improvements on Version control part of Orcas and you can try it yourself by downloading Orcas

Soon to follow a blog on great new features on Orcas Team Build. Stay tuned .....

All Orcas Beta 1 downloads available

srikanth_r — Fri, 04 May 2007 08:24:00 GMT

Glad to know that all of the Visual Studio Team System "Orcas" Beta1 downloads are now available. The VPC images were available a couple weeks ago but last night we finally got the self extracting installer images available for folks that want to install the product themselves on their own machines.

Download and try it now !

Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 and Team Architect

srikanth_r — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:06:00 GMT

The first beta is available for Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects "Orcas". Over the next couple of weeks I will try to go much deeper into several of the features which has been added to Team Architect for Orcas. You can download Orcas Beta 1 here, there are also VPC images available to give it a try.

Summary of new Experiences/Features:

Top-down System Design

Top-down system design allows users to reason about the design of a business solution without having to be confronted with technology decisions. The tool user is able to progressively refine a high-level system design, designing new sub-systems and applications in the context of the system in which they are to be used. With a top-down design approach, the user can describe the structure and connectivity of the overall design using un-typed systems initially, deferring technology decisions until later. When appropriate, the user can implement the design using specific technologies by introducing specific application and endpoint types.

This feature promotes the System Diagram to the forefront of the architectural design process within Visual Studio Team System

Conform to WSDL

Conform to WSDL addresses the problems related to contract changes during the development lifecycle, by providing an automated means to update an existing Web service implementation so that that its skeleton (methods, method signatures and message classes) conforms to a specified WSDL contract. The developer is then required to make the associated changes to the business logic (and possibly the implementation logic), which generally cannot be known from the contract definition. This feature facilitates developers adopting a contract-driven approach to Web service development.

Web Application Projects

This feature will provide users of Team Architect the ability to generate and round-trip web application projects (WAP) through the same gestures that they would use to generate and round-trip web sites in the Visual Studio 2005 series of product. The UI (shape semantics on the diagram, properties, etc.) will be exactly the same. The only difference will be that the output is a web project with slightly different generated artifacts – a VS project file with "code behind" web pages/services.

Architectural Roles

The Architectural Roles feature enables an architect, while working on the high-level design of a system’s architecture using the System Designer, to introduce elements into the design that play a specific pre-defined architectural role(s) within architectural patterns. For example a user can create roles specific to aspects of their application architecture, such as Smart Client, Entity Service, Workflow Service, Service Agent, etc.

Compatibility Orcas - VS 2005

srikanth_r — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:31:00 GMT

After a bit of research I found that there are some compatibility issue between Orcas and VS 2005.

Client side VS add-ins will need to be recompiled (or have policy changed) because the TFS OM assembly versions will change and add-ins will need to bind to the new assemblies. The APIs themselves are generally not changing, so we don’t expect much in the way of code changes – just recompilation.
Build is the only area where we plan to have some compatibility disconnects. In general, most build operations - listing build definitions, starting and stopping builds, examining build reports, etc. will work both with 2005 client -> Orcas server and Orcas client -> 2005 server. However, here are a few caveats:

An Orcas TFS server will only work with an Orcas build server - so you'll need to upgrade your build server when you upgrade your TFS server.
For an VS2005 client to start a build on an Orcas server, the build definition needs to be stored at $/<TeamProject>/TeamBuildTypes/<name>. In Orcas, you have more flexibility as to where to put them.
Changes made to properties in the .proj file that are in the database in Orcas will not be updated in the database and will no longer be in sync.
VS2005 will be able to start a build, but it can’t queue a build, see the list of builds in the queue, see the list of build agents, etc.
An Orcas client will not be able to create a new build definition on a TFS2005 server.
When starting a build, an Orcas client will not be able to change any parameters in the dialog for a TFS2005 Server