Time tracking and timesheet software is becoming more and more popular nowadays for it has proved to be beneficial both for small and large companies, for the employers and employees. The market for timesheet software is quite various, so learning it can make one uncertain about what package to choose. To simplify the search, it’s wise to consider budget, business requirements and to approach a question seriously:

1. The first step is to prepare a list of the things you are going to use timesheet software for: billing clients for time recorded by your staff, communicating with payroll systems, enforcing labor policies, etc. Define the functions for which you already have a specific process or policy and decide whether you wish to change your policies to comply with the software or whether you want to pay a fee to customize the software to your policies.
2. Then surf the Web to look for timesheet software providers. Most will offer a free trial or at least an online demo, so you can see how closely the package matches your needs. Make sure you look at packages with processes and workflows for your type of business – buying the packaged version of software meant for your vertical industry helps avoid spending money on customization.
3. Don’t hesitate to contact vendors through the contact forms on their web sites in order to define weather their products are those required for your business needs.

Besides, you can ask others what they use and what they like and don’t like about their software, and look for software reviews on the internet. Considering a vendor you should also consider the things like customer support, warranties, upgrades (free or charged), the number of users, the license and customization fees, etc.

Agile development sounds great and gains more and more popularity. However, there is often a risk for an Agile project to go wrong.

When implemented well, Agile methods turn beneficial:

- they provide working software quickly;
- they give the customer the ability to change his mind routinely;
- they provide insight into the actual progress of the project.

But, there are at least three potential risks to consider before plunging deep into Agile:

• Agile methods are easily misunderstood.

  In fact, Agile comprises active customer involvement, responding to changes instead of following a plan, focus on individuals and interactions, releasing software early and often. Agile practices, like any other practices, are learned through example, application, and training. If the practices are disconnected from the philosophy, the result just won’t work.

• It’s easy to start thinking you are doing right, when you are doing wrong.

  Agile techniques require depth: the ability to know the right techniques for the current project, and the ability to choose between them. If make a team just throw away waterfall methods without giving them direction, it will result in devolving into endless code-and-fix process.

• Agile makes the process visible

  Agile allows watching the progress. If someone in an Agile workshop isn’t contributing, it becomes obvious in no time. For those used to complex, bureaucratic waterfall structures, which are opaque, this exact feature may look like a disadvantage.

But the main risk is that poorly implemented Agile methods can leave an organization in worse shape than when it started, with all the same problems, less documentation, and worse architecture.

Hello!

You know what? I like storms, real storms with lightning and thunder. And I like the rattling sound of falling raindrops. It amazes me. Especially, when I’m inside ). But it’s a, let’s say, lyrical digression. I was about something different.

First, since Wednesday VSTS 2010 is available for public download.

Then, here is some upgrade news on TFS 2010.

Starting from the bad one: unfortunately, there is no upgrade to TFS 2010 from TFS 2005. The 2005 owners will have to wait until Beta 2 release.

The good news is for TFS 2008 owners. As Brian Harry said in his blog, upgrading a TFS 2008 server to TFS 2010 Beta 1 should work. However some of new TFS 2010 features won’t work because they rely on changes to the process template or other artifacts in projects that won’t be there for upgraded projects. But there are many other great new features one can start using right after upgrading a server.

A very good article, describing a step-by-step TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 upgrade process is available here.

Hi there!

Well, while TFS 2010 is still in a “coming soon” state, let’s talk about TFS 2008. )

I’ve recently found a blog with some tips on the use of TFS 2008. Maybe, someone will find them interesting and helpful. Let’s take, for example, the “Annotate” feature which allows to see changes occurred in a particular file with respect to a particular change set. Thus, one may view all the change sets and the exactly changes to a particular file it did. This is feature may help when one’s working in a team and working on a particular file and unable to understand what changes the teammates have actually caused in that file.

Annotate is a built-in the Team Explorer functionality and may be activated by right clicking on any file and choosing “Annotate” from the menu. Here is what it looks like:

The file will be opened in the IDE with the change set numbers, the information about authors and dates of changes.

There is also a possibility to view the details of the particular change set.

Haven’t stolen a tip from Sara Ford for a while, so there, another tip for VSTS 2008.

So, this one shows how to go directly to the code samples from within Visual Studio.

To get to the samples installed for VS, you only need to go to Help-Samples and click on the local Samples folder link in the browser.

Note, the samples are in a .zip file and need to be extracted first.

More on Sarah’s tips: she has a book, called Visual Studio Tips, 251 Way to Improve Your Productivity, full of useful tips on Visual Studio.

When your work circles around TFS, it’s nice to know whenever a new Work Item is assigned or the status of an old one gets changed. E-mail alerts are perfect in that sense. I just came across this blog post on setting up E-mail alerts from TFS through Gmail. Getting TFS alerts in your gmail account can be handy you use a lot of Goodle apps for work. Lev Blavias, the author of the post, recommends this link to help set up the alerts. He notes, that for the connection to work the following components need to be installed first: Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2008 Power Tool, Stunnel, and an SMTP virtual server needs to be set up on the machine.

But google apps and gmail are still far from being THE all-enterprise system for itnernal use, so for a lot of companies linking Microsoft Office with TFS is much more relevant.

Speaking of e-mail, some tools already offer connectors linking MS Outlook and TFS. The nice thing about such tools is that you don’t have to go through a lengthy set-up process yourself, as it’s already been configured for you. All it takes is to install the add-on and alas! Not only do you get your TFS alerts in Outlook, you can also create new TFS work items and meetings without ever opening TFS.

Here’s how this could look:

Installing TFS 2008 with Sql Server 2008 can be quite problematic, especially when it comes to the SQL Server Reporting Services.

Here’s a problem a recent geekswithblogs.net post discusses.

If you realize your configuration tool has issues with prior installations of software, and the report urls are pointing to a SQL Express directory, it’s best to go over the set up of virtual directories manually. This requires application pool set up.

Chris Eargle in his post suggets that the service user be assigned to run the pool, after which the user should be granted write access to the RSTempFiles folder.

What’s weird, is that at this point an error pops up saying: “the path is not a legal form.”

Alas, here’s a solution:

if you receive this error, you need to add your application pool user to the SQLServerReportServerUser (followed by $servername$instancename) group. It’s that simple, but the error doesn’t indicate what is necessary to fix it.

Eugene Zakhareyev writes on TFS permissions and lists some principles to keep in mind when working with permissions. Here’s his list of best practices when it comes to working with the most problematic permissions area, version control specific permission issues :

1. Set as few permissions as possible. Ideally, you would set permissions on server, project and immediate project subfolders at most (and set server/project permissions by assignment to appropriate pre-defined groups). That way you will be able to immediately know where to look for the “root” of any permission problem.
2. Never set permission on files (that can be viewed as more of the same topic as in previous paragraph, but I cannot say that enough).
3. Use inheritance as much as possible; start with most permissive set-up and partition by using Deny.
4. If you find yourself setting certain permissions more than once, script them using tf permissions (use tfssecurity for global and area permissions). In this way potential for human error is minimized.

Mac Noland posted his solution to a bug in TFS that happens when you try to delete (or perform other workspace actions) on a workspace owned by a user who no longer is in Active Directory.

What they did was manually updating the TfsVersionControl, Tbl_Workspace table and changing the OwerId field to a valid user for that workspace.

Our team encountered the a bug in TFS’05, TFS’05 SP1, and TFS’08 where we’d get GCHandle error whenever we tried to create WorkItem through WorkItemTracking API.

After a while of pondering on what and how, we solved it by creating an IIS Application Pool for each tire of the application. Then wherever the access to WorkItemStore API was required in the configuration, the team used the following settings: (priorly granting the IIS Application Pool user rights to write in YOUR CACHE FOLDER catalogue)…and guess what? The problem was gone.