Hi there!

Look, what I’ve found lately. It’s really amazing. Looking through the Martin Woodward’s blog, I’ve found Brian the Build Bunny. Have you heard about it?

That blog post is pretty old, actually, but the idea is sooooo great. Well, I’ll tell you in case you haven’t heard about the Bunny.

Actually, the Build Bunny is a gadget based on the Nabaztagtag WiFi Rabbit toy.Martin made him read out details of check-ins and builds. If a build has failed then Bunny’s ears go down to show how sad he feels, but if you fix the build his ears will soon pick up again.

How does it work? Well, it is, as Martin wrote, pretty much a standard TFS event listener that then sends text to the rabbit using the Nabaztag API.

Team Foundation Server provides a mechanism by which one can subscribe to events when certain things happen. This is actually how many of the components in TFS are integrated between themselves and like the rest of the TFS.

The code behind Brian the Build Bunny is actually very simple, a web service listens for the events and then converts this into a string on text which it sends to the Nabaztag servers. Nabaztag run this text through a Text to Speech engine and generate an MP3 file with the results, they then notify a build bunny about the MP3 file and he downloads the file over his WiFi connection and plays it on his speakers.

If you find that post at Martin Woodward’s, there are more details provided there, as well as some code examples.

I think it’s nice to have such cute a creature to inform you about the state of your code ))

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.

Well, while Visual Studio guys catch 2010 Beta 1 installation bugs and explain users how to deal with the problems, I’ll quickly go and have a look of what else future VSTS 2010 users may expect from it.

Frankly, I admire the VSTS team, for the work they’ve done about TFS 2010 version seems really fascinating. There’ve been lots of improvements and new features introduced in almost every Visual Studio area.

Here are some more, i’ve read about lately:

First, there are improvements in project management. Starting with Work Item Tracking, where there’s been introduced the ability to break down work items into hierarchies, custom link types allowing a user to define one of 4 link “topologies”:

• Network –Any two items can be connected and the link has the same name at both ends.
• Tree – A hierarchical link type that defines a “parent/child” relationship. A parent can have many children but a child can only have one parent of a given tree link type.
• Dependency – A directed graph where links connect work items but there can’t be a cycle.
• Directed network – kind of a half way type between network and dependency. There are no constraints on what or how many work items can be related but each end of the link has a unique name (e.g. Tests & Tested By)

Then, there come link queries and new links control. Moreover, there are a bunch of other work item control improvements in addition to the links control including HTML control, link labels, edit, and labels.

Field comparison and group membership queries have been introduced. In TFS 2010, work item query clauses can compare fields with each other, while in previous versions they could only compare a field against a constant. And it’s now possible to easily write queries that filter by groups of people. A new feature called query folders allows organizing queries into folders both under My Queries and under Team Queries. Further, under Team Queries, one can delegate permissions to the sub folders to whomever they like.

Then, some more project management features, including:

Successor/Predecessor – Now with the user definable link types, there’s a possibility to define a link type to represent successor/predecessor relationships and round trip them between TFS and project as well.
Rollups – The work was done to make the project summary tasks and the calculations that Project does round trip well with TFS.
Undo – One now can undo changes made in an MS Project workbook that is bound to TFS. In previous versions undo was disabled due to difficulty coordinating the undo across MS Project and TFS data.

There is also the introduction of 4 dashboards (Work Progress, Product Quality, Test Progress and Build Quality) easy to customize, improved excel services and new reporting features, and many more.

The detailed overviews are here and here.

There’ve been also talks about democratizing application lifecycle management. An emphasis will be put on better cooperation between business, development departments and test departments. Thus all the members of a development organization will be brought into the application development life cycle, and many of the existing barriers to integration will be removed.

In his Friday’s blog post, Jihad Dannawi, Microsoft developer tools solution specialist, announced the release of the beta 1 of the long-awaited Visual Studio 2010. The release is planned for Monday, May 18, i.e. for today.

“Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN [Microsoft Developer Network] Subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on Wednesday, May 20th through Microsoft Downloads,” he wrote.

When VS 2010 was first announced last autumn, it was said that there would be a try to democratize the application lifecycle, by allowing all contributors on a software project to participate throughout the lifecycle.

About a week ago, Jason Zander, manager for Visual Studio’s developer division, shared some of the changes they made responding to the users’ unpopular feedbacks. One was to abandon triangles from the outline mode, which most users found a bad idea. Zander also provided some updates done to the performance area – the subject that worried the users greatly, according to their feedbacks.

Hi there!

Getting back to some more VSTS 2008 tips.

What to do if you need to create an empty solution within a folder structure to have the possibility to add new projects to this solution later. Here is the answer from SmallWorkarounds .

1. One possible solution is to enable “Always Show Solution” in the Projects And Solution Tree inside the Options in Visual Studio. If you enable this then whenever you create a new project a solution will also be created for you with that project. This sometimes is a problem when we create only a single website and want a .sln or “solution file” to load that project.

2. Another approach is just navigate to Other Project Types and in that go the subtree “Visual Studio Solutions” and here you will find “Blank Solution” template, this will open for you a blank solution into which you can add projects.

Initially there will be no projects loaded as we have not created any project. Right click the solution and go to Add and then add new project, add new website, add existing project, add existing website whatever you like.

I still continue exploring the novelties of TFS 2010. From time to time Brian Harry posts marvelous overviews of new features and improvements done to TFS. And I see many improvements done to increase usability. And that’s great, because TFS is quite a big and complex thing, and adopting TFS needs big amount of adequate training. So, I think, any steps towards better usability and understanding of the product will be, undoubtedly, welcome.

Back to the TFS 2010 features, there will be significant changes in the administration part.
First, administration console appears to help understand how TFS is configured, and to make adjustments. Features of the admin console include:

1. Review/configure TFS topology – application tiers, data tiers, databases, Sharepoint, Reporting Services, build servers, etc.
   Enumerate, create and delete team project collections
   Enable/disable Team Project Collections – individual Team Project Collections can be disabled/enabled so they can be serviced independently.
   Export/Import of TPCs (see the section on Team Project Collections for more on this)
   Consolidated access to various TFS logs, and more

Much progress was made in consolidating the various admin tools (witimport, witexport, …) into a few broader admin tools – tfsconfig, witadmin, …

And lastly, username support has been introduced. In previous versions of TFS, changing a user’s name was manual. Once it was changed in Windows/AD, there were steps that that had to be run to update TFS. For a large organization, it was a repetitive task. In TFS 2010, it is totally automatic. When a user’s name is changed in Windows/AD, TFS is automatically updated.

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.

According to Brian Harry, one of the real novelties in TFS 2010 will be the concept called Team Project Collections.

“In TFS 2010 a TFS farm hosts Team Project Collections and not just Team Projects as it was in TFS 2008. A Team Project Collection is a group of related Team Projects and a TFS farm can host many Team Project Collections. To try to make an analogy with TFS 2008, it’s as if TFS 2008 could host exactly 1 Team Project Collection per physical TFS server. Just about any statement you might make about a TFS 2008 server would apply to a TFS 2010 Team Project Collection (TPC)”.

Moreover, Team Project Collections are independent of each other. That means that two TPCs can both have a work items with the same work item ID. In TFS 2008 things could be identified by server URL + ID. In TFS 2010 one can identify them by server URL + team project collection + ID.

Here is the illustration:

This is what one sees when connecting to a TFS server in TFS 2008. There is a possibility to choose a server and one or several Team Projects out of the list to work on.

In TFS 2010, the Connect to TFS dialog looks like this:

There is now a list of Team Project Collections (currently labeled “Directory”)on the left, and on the right, there is a list of Team Projects within the selected Collection. The client will only allow you to connect to projects in one TPC at a time.

As you already know, Microsoft made SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 available about a week ago. You may also know, that a lot of folks have been confused by the installation problems, so lots of questions arose round this very service pack.

Brian Harry, for example, has been attacked with questions about whether or not TFS 2008 SP1 will work with SQL 2008 SP1, according to his latest blog post. There he reassures TFS 2008 users that it, certainly, will, but… But they’ll have to do quite a piece of work to get it to install.

The problem has to do with version checks that the TFS installer does to ensure the SQL version is compatible. The checks are too restrictive and even though it will actually work, the installer will insist on incompatibility of the SQL version.

The solution is the install order. According to Brian

If you already have TFS 2008 SP1 running with SQL 2008, and you want to upgrade SQL to 2008 SP1, that will just work - because you aren’t running TFS setup where the block happens. If, on the other hand, you want to install TFS 2008 SP1 using an already installed SQL 2008 SP1 server, you will need to modify an XML file to get around the block.

Microsoft explains the process in this KB article.

Hi!

Did you know that Grant Holliday has recently announced TFS Performance Report Pack? Several useful reports are available now, so anyone may install them on his own server and monitor TFS server’s performance. According to Grant, the plan is to eventually roll the reports into a power tool release or a subsequent release of VSTS. But we will know more about it when it happens (or if it happens).

Here are the reports available:

Execution Time Summary - visualizes the load, in this case reflected by total execution time, on the server from two axes: users and commands
.
Server Status - Source Control Request Queue – provides a view into the queue of a series of requests that get queued to be processed as transactions are committed to the database.

Server Status - Top Users Bypassing Proxies - allows administrators a view into which users are not complying with internal guidelines and hence decreasing overall server performance.

Server Status - Historical Performance Trends - summarizes the average response time for two of the Team Foundation Server subsystems: Work Item Tracking and Version Control.

Server Status - Recent Performance Trends - provides more data granularity about the performance of the server.

This is just an overview, you know. Simply to get you informed in case you haven’t heard about it yet. You will find more details at Grant Holliday’s.