Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team

Microsoft has Acquired the Teamprise Client Suite

gdavi — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:53:39 GMT

Very interesting and exciting news – Microsoft has acquired the Teamprise Client Suite that provides (amongst other things) access to TFS from Eclipse. Good blogs to read:

The official announcement

From the Visual Studio product group

From Teamprise

Cheers,

Giles

Enabling Code Coverage in VS 2010 Beta 2

gdavi — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:17:18 GMT

A quick “how-to” as the steps to enable code coverage are different in Beta 2. To enable code coverage (assuming that you have some unit tests defined already and that you have either Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Premium or Ulitmate):

Open the Solution Explorer.
Open the Solution Items folder
Double-click the Local.testsettings file:

Select the Data and Diagnostics option in the left hand list:

Select Code Coverage and make sure that it is enabled AND (and here’s the obvious but easy to overlook bit) click on the Configure option at the top of the table:

Select the artifacts that you want to enable code coverage for (in my case only the application code, not the tests themselves).
Click OK, Apply the changes, run the Unit tests and view the code coverage results:

And that’s it – hopefully that might help avoid a couple of minutes of wondering where the configuration settings can be found.

Cheers,

Giles

Migrate Existing Test Cases To TFS 2010

RichE — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:52:00 GMT

If you have been looking at the new Test & Lab Manager with Visual Studio 2010 and you're wondering how you can import your existing test cases then take a look at the Test Case Migrator (Excel) Tool that has just been released to Codeplex.

Rich

What Does The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2“Go Live” Licence Mean?

gdavi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:11:11 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .NET Framework 4 are declared as “go live” releases. What does this mean? A good overview from Jeff Beehler.

Cheers,

Giles

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Is Available

gdavi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:38:35 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available from MSDN now. It will be made generally available on the 21st October. A comprehensive “how-to” around where to get it, how to install it and other useful information has been published by Brian Keller.

I’m now running Team Foundation Server 2010 natively on my Windows 7 laptop in a Basic configuration, without SQL Server or SharePoint installed, and it’s looking great. I’m really enjoying not having to have a server operating system (running in a virtual machine) just to work with my own team projects. Fantastic for small teams, or make the most of the full version with SQL Server and WSS/MOSS.

Cheers,

Giles

How TFS 2010 Provides Even Better Support For Small Teams

gdavi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:31:56 GMT

Great post from Brian Harry on how TFS 2010 can be installed on client machines with minimal infrastructure, e.g. a Windows 7 netbook. So, if you’d like an easier install on a wider variety of OS’s (client and server, 32 and 64 bit) it’s a good article to read.

Cheers,

Giles

Get ready for Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2: Chat with the TFS Setup and Admin Team

gdavi — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:06:42 GMT

I’ve copied the blurb from the post for a LiveMeeting on installing TFS 2010 Beta 2 on the 15th October:

“The Team Foundation Server Setup and Admin team would like to help get you ready for Team Foundation Server Beta2 with a live presentation via live meeting.

While the session will focus on getting Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) up and running Ed will also be touching on the features that now enable TFS to “scale down” to the smallest development efforts from both resource and administration point of view. This will session be a little different than my normal presentations in that we will also be running a parallel chat session for people to ask questions in real time.“

Cheers,

Giles

Mainframe Support for TFS from Teamprise

gdavi — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:02:26 GMT

I thought this was an interesting blog post from Martin Woodward at Teamprise discussing how they are working on mainframe integration via Teamprise into TFS.

Cheers,

Giles

Windows 7 RTM Available to all MSDN Subscribers on August 6

Jon Pratt — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:25:00 GMT

On August 6^th, the first public release of Windows 7 will be to MSDN Subscribers, which is over two months ahead of the general availability date of October 22^nd for retail and OEM customers. To support the variety of languages and builds, 893 different images are being released to MSDN Subscriber Downloads in three waves through August 21^st.

We expect that this release will break all MSDN download traffic records, which is why groups from across the company have gone through tremendous effort to ensure its success. This has included but is not limited to: load and performance testing on the MSDN Web site, adding significant capacity to the product key servers, performance testing on the product key servers, capacity planning for the download servers and network, and more.

Quest Releases Beta of Oracle DSP for Visual Studio Team System 2010

Jon Pratt — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:32:00 GMT

Quest Software has released a public beta of “Project Fuze,” a database schema provider (DSP) for Oracle databases that can be used within Visual Studio Team System 2010. Project Fuze enables Oracle developers to manage schema changes, PL SQL, stored procedures, triggers and more right from within Visual Studio Team System 2010. All of this work can be done offline and then deployed to various servers. When it comes time to deploy, the Oracle developer can compare the offline schema model in Visual Studio Team System 2010 to the live database instance and create an update script to synchronize the two. Finally, all work items can be stored and versioned under Team Foundation Server source code control along with the rest of the application. This will enable the Oracle database professional to better integrate themselves with the development team, at the same time becoming familiar with Microsoft tools and platforms.

Details at: www.teamfuze.net

New TFS Migration Solutions Page

gdavi — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:30:10 GMT

There’s a new consolidated summary of the TFS migration and integration solutions available here. It’s a good, clear summary of the options available if you want to migrate from an existing product or are looking for integrations.

Cheers
Giles

Automated Build Video

gdavi — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:51:03 GMT

I’ve put together a video on the automated build capabilities of Team Foundation Server. I thought it would be useful to step through running a build, looking at the results of a build and understanding what triggers you can set for automated builds.

You can download the video here.

Cheers

Giles

Code Quality with The Development Edition

gdavi — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:06:55 GMT

I thought it might be interesting to quickly demonstrate how you can go beyond unit testing with Visual Studio Team System Development Edition and take a look at code coverage, code metrics and code analysis:

You can get the video here. Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for future topics; I’m currently planning to do a build and a process video next.

Cheers,

Giles

Second Video in the Series – MY First TEam Project

gdavi — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:29:24 GMT

To follow up on Rich’s video What is Visual Studio Team System I’ve added a second video to the series which continues the introduction but this time by walking through the creation of a new Team Project, explaining the options and discussing the main elements of the newly created project.

I was trying to keep to 5 minutes, and nearly made it (2 seconds over):

Download the video here.

Bringing Your TFS Process Template To Life with Talmia

RichE — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:31:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Giles and I made the journey up to Harrow to check out a new VSTS add-in from one of our Inner Circle & VSIP partners. Gamcom have recently launched Talmia which is an ALM process automation and reporting tool for VSTS and after a quick demo from Chris Turvil at Gamcom it was clear that it offered some very nice extensions to TFS

So what is it?

Talmia is designed to automate the workflow of Work Items stored in Team Foundation Server. Although the tool can be used to generate a TFS Process Template it will work nicely in conjunction with the Process Template Editor available with the Team Foundation Server Power Tools.

Where do I start?

For more information a good place to start is the datasheet and the How Does It Work section of the Talmia site.

Talmia Designer

Take your TFS Process Template and using the Talmia Designer you can begin to build an automated workflow for each type of work in your project. The designer is a stand alone application aimed at non-technical users and utilises the Windows Workflow design surface to allow drag and drop design.

The Talmia Designer

Looking at the screen above, we are building a workflow for a Construction Task. The first thing that has to be signed off is the “Understand Requirements” Work Item. When this has been transitioned into the “Approved” state using any TFS client (eg. Visual Studio, Team System Web Access), the “Create Unit Design” & “Create Unit Test Plan” Tasks will be created in TFS. This workflow will continue until the “Unit Ready to Release” Review has been completed.

So, as a result of a Work Item being created in TFS or a field within a Work Item changing, any custom activity can be invoked. For example, creating or altering other work items, starting an automated build, sending notifications or anything else you can think of. This is all generated quickly and easily through the designer

Talmia Control Centre

Once your workflow has been designed it can be deployed using the Talmia Control Centre. The Workflow is then assigned to one or more existing TFS Team Projects. Multiple versions of the same workflow can be stored in the Talmia Server so not all Team Projects must use the latest version. The Control Centre also provides comprehensive reporting for running workflows and it can be accessed within Visual Studio via the Team Explorer or as a standalone web application

The Control Centre available in Team Explorer

Control Centre as Stand Alone Web App.

Talmia Server

Talmia Server is the glue that brings your TFS Process Template and your Talmia Workflow together. It ensures that all Team System Work Items needed for a process are created, updated, and validated interactively based on user actions. Work items are created only as and when they are required - meaning that next process actions are always clear.

As well as managing work items automatically, Talmia Server intercepts TFS events to execute the behaviours specified in your Talmia workflow.

Reports

The reports coming out of Talmia compliment the existing TFS reports. Typical questions that Talmia reporting can address include:

How many Talmia workflows are currently active on a project?
How far is the project through each phase? (design, construction, testing, etc.)

For each individual workflow:

How is work progressing?
Which Work Items affect the process and what is their current status?
Is any work overdue?
Who completed each process step and when?
How much rework has occurred and why?

Report on an executing workflow showing re-work and current state

Summary

Talmia is definitely worth a closer look if you would like to further automate your development processes using TFS. It looks like a very well architected solution and is being put through it’s paces in a number of demanding projects.

During our demo we thought of a number of project scenarios where we could see Talmia being very useful but it was actually a non-development usage that really impressed us as it demonstrated the power and flexibility of both Talmia & TFS. Chris showed us their “New Starter” workflow which was designed using Talmia with all data stored in TFS. It allowed the firm to easily track all of their new hires, what equipment had been assigned to them, what training they had received and report on what stage of the joining process each employee was at.

Richard