The Holiday season is in full bloom, huh?

Oh well, before disappearing for the long weekend, I thought I’d share the latest TFS Radio episode with you. Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff talks about the history of Team System, how the teams in Microsoft ship the Team System product and reveals some of the plans for the future. As usual, all can be found on RadioTFS.

Happy New Year and have a wonderful one!

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.

It turns out that renting instead of buying is possible with Microsoft software too.

You can rent Team Foundation Server on the Phase 2 International website. They offer hosted TFS, and allow companies to use the software while saving up on time and money. Oh and the bonus - it’s hosted, so you can pretty much access it from anywhere in the world as long as you’re connected to the internet. TFS on your mobile device? Yep.

Oh and free support…free sounds good, doesn’t it?

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:

Just a quick sidenote to keep up with the development framework that made TeamExpand happen: did you know .NET has a new logo, did you know that?

The new logo was announced in October. The previous logo was created in 2000 and lasted 8 years.

The reason for this re-branding lies in the changes that took place in Microsoft products over the last years. .NET logo is now more than an addition to Microsoft’s other products, rather something bigger, associated with Visual Studio and Silverlight.

The .NET Framework is an integral Windows component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and XML Web services.

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.

I quite enjoyed this recent episode of Visual Studio 2010 Talks. Stephanie Saad, a group program manager with Microsoft talks about how Microsoft is already using the new features of TFS.

And here’s a link to Stephanie’s Power Point presentation on from Microsoft TechEd 2008

I didn’t know (okay-okay, I might have missed on the news) that Microsoft calls the way they use their own software in-house “dogfooding”.

Stephanie explains why:

* Dogfood: n. [Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing. “To eat one’s own dogfood“… means to use the software one is developing, as part of one’s everyday development environment… Developers… using their own software will quickly learn what’s missing or broken.

The presentation also covers:
Cool Facts about Microsoft Development
Getting started on a release
Development
Tracking and Reporting
Migration and Interoperability

Really worth downloading, at least for the “One Team’s Hall Whiteboard after TFS dogfood outages summer 08)” (you’ll know what I mean, when you see it).

P.s. Come to think of it, we at TeamExpand, too, dogfood our products (TX Chrono and TX Looker), can’t say there’s any negative experience assosiated with it. hm.

MSDN has an awesome article on process templated in TFS. It covers how you can basically control all the work done within a team project.

A team project is simply a bucket that stores and partitions all of the artifacts you track and use during a development project.

The New Team Project wizard in Team Foundation Client (TFC) with lots of templates out there and ready for use can really streamline your projects.

Quite informative, do check it out.

Here’s a small preview:

MSF Agile Bug States and Transitions

MSF CMMI Bug States and Transitions

TFS Build Monitor - yet another sweet device for Team Foundation Server.

The application monitors TFS build status and qualities and switches light colours whenever something goes wrong with the status/ quality and whenever any changes occur.

At this stage alerts can sent to either:
* Twitter, or
* a USB Build Light

When the build is good, the lamp is green - when it breaks the lamp goes red. The light will flash yellow when a build is in progress and partial success is shown by both red & green LEDs lighting up.

Information from the tool’s Codeplex page.

“Team”…presupposes a sort of unity around the same cause or idea among its members. Microsoft tries to reinforce that idea in their Team Foundation Server as much as possible. Nothing wrong with that. =)

Next month Larry Guger will be holding a free seminar on the collaboration features and capabilities provided by TFS.

During the seminar, Larry will discuss the collaborative side of Team Foundation Server and how it fits into the developer side of TFS. He will also share the vision that Microsoft has for TFS as a tool for every stakeholder in a project.

Among other, the topics to be covered include requirements tracking and integration, relating code and check-ins to requirements, making the most of work items and Project Templates, using TFS from Linux and Eclipse with Teamprise etc.

Register here.

Join Larry on December 10 at 9:00 am at:
Microsoft Corporation
10260 SW Greenburg Rd
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
USA