TFS Migration Blog : Migration Toolkit

V1.0 of the Migration and Synchronization Toolkit has been released!

mmitrik — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:00:00 GMT

The first complete version of the Migration and Synchronization Toolkit has been released on CodePlex! To get the latest source code, including the complete reference implementations, please visit the CodePlex page for the Toolkit: http://www.codeplex.com/MigrationSyncToolkit

In addition to updating the source code and reference implementations, a significant amount of new documentation has been added. From the home page of the CodePlex project, there are links to pages to help users getting started, define the features, and provide guidance of building a tool, just to name a few. Over the next few weeks, we will be adding to the content on the wikis, including some user feedback from our pilot programs for the toolkit.

Please also remember to give us feedback! Any comments on the usage of the toolkit, questions about writing tools, questions on using the tools, and comments on the documentation are all welcomed. All the feedback that we can get will ultimately help to improve the Toolkit, so please speak up if you have any comments.

Since the prerelease version, we've seen many requests for various tools to help migrate and synchronize data between version control and work item/bug tracking systems. Part of the motivation behind this toolkit was to encourage community development of tools for common systems used by TFS users and potential TFS users. If you are interested in starting an open/shared source project to develop a tool, please let us know, and we can help to get a project started on CodePlex.

What migration tools are you looking for?

mmitrik — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:07:00 GMT

I've heard plenty of requests for tools to migrate data from competitor products to TFS, and I'm trying to find out which tools have the highest demand. If you need a tool to integrate Subversion and TFS, for example, please reply to this post and let us know. Or better yet, create a new item in the issue tracker so that others can vote on the tools they want to see developed.

I'm also thinking about how to encourage the community to work together to develop migration and synchronization tools. Surely there is more than one person with a need for a SVN tool that is willing to develop it using the toolkit, so why not bring those heads together?

I'll start it off and open an issue for a SVN to TFS migration tool, and see where that goes. Hopefully others will follow.

http://www.codeplex.com/MigrationSyncToolkit/WorkItem/List.aspx

Migration and Synchronization Toolkit Prerelease Published on CodePlex

mmitrik — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 01:29:00 GMT

A prerelease of the Migration and Synchronization Toolkit has been released on CodePlex! If you are interested in seeing the progress that we have made to date, and are eager to try out the sample tools, please visit the project site on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/MigrationSyncToolkit

All of the source code and documentation for the toolkit is available on the project site. The source code can be downloaded from the .zip archive on the Releases tab. From the home page, the Getting Started page should provide all of the info to setup and build the toolkit, and the Release notes contains the info pertinent to this prerelease.

Please note that this is a prerelease version of the Migration and Synchronization Toolkit. Several features are not complete and as testing has not completed, the code has the potential to contain bugs and overwrite data stored in TFS. Please be careful to use this only in a testing environment and not on live production data.

Toolkit Spec Published

mmitrik — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:24:00 GMT

As a part of the effort to get feedback on the specs for VS Orcas release, we have published our in-progress spec for the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit. It is available, along with the other TFS and VS Orcas feature specs on MSDN.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948851.aspx

To get the feedback to our team you can use the feedback link on the MSDN page, or feel free to leave feedback here. We look forward to your comments!

Channel 9 Interview

mmitrik — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:43:00 GMT

If you are interested in our upcoming strategies and plans for TFS Migration, check out this interview on Channel 9 (shameless plug):

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=283218

If you have any feedback on the interview or the topics discussed please share them here. We would be happy to see what others are thinking about migration and TFS.

Synchronization of labels

mmitrik — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 17:28:00 GMT

In my previous posts, it was not made clear that the migration toolkit will support bi-directional synchronization as well as one-way conversion. This enables many useful scenarios including the ability to migrate portions of a project over time.

Synchronization does bring up some complex scenarios, especially for non-versioned items. We have come across a few questions concerning how labels in a version control system should be migrated/synchronized with TFS. Any feedback on this is welcome.

What level of support for migrating labels is optimal?

Should all labels be migrated during the initial conversion of data,
or should users be able to choose specific labels to migrate,
or should no labels be migrated (they can be added in TFS after migrating)?

For labels that exist in both systems (the original system and TFS) after initial conversion:

Is it useful to synchronize labels across systems?
Are there specific labels that would be useful to synchronize between systems (i.e. a recent build label)?
Should labels only be synchronized if they are manually chosen to be synchronized?

TFS Migration Toolkit

mmitrik — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:40:00 GMT

Over the past few months we've been working on the development of a toolkit to facilitate the creation of tools to migrate data into TFS. Using this toolkit, the task of creating a tool to convert data from a given version control/work-item tracking system will be greatly simplified. The toolkit will provide many of the features that are standard in any data conversion tool and will abstract away the TFS OM. This means that tool authors only need to write a plug-in specific to the system of their choice.

Some of the features that we are providing as part of the toolkit include:

Specification of settings through a well defined XML configuration file
Ability to configure several migration sessions in a single location
Robust analysis and conversion engine
Conflict resolution mechanisms
Real-time and post migration reporting

We are also planning to release this toolkit via the web in a shared-source manner. This would allow anyone to download, modify, and re-distribute the toolkit to meet their specific needs. As we get nearer to the release, I'll be sure to post more details.

For those teams that are planning to migrate from other systems to TFS, how does this list of features line up with what you would need to successfully migrate to TFS? Besides version control and work-item tracking, what other areas of software development could benefit from a migration tool?