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 ))
Not so long ago the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle team announced the release of Microsoft SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System. This new template is designed to work with TFS 2008 and makes writing secure code much easier. The new SDL template has a solution that reduces the barrier to entry for SDL adoption, provides auditing for satisfying the security requirements, and helps demonstrate security return on investment.
There is a short overview of its options:
The Process Guidance page provides a security owner with five steps for Getting Started on an SDL project, and details on customizing the template and extending it for third party security tools.
For developers, who care about security, but want it to be intuitive, the SDL Process Template includes check-in policies. These policies ensure every check-in of code is taking advantage of the SDL required compiler/linker flags and Code Analysis features already in Visual Studio. This will eliminate entire classes of security weaknesses from the code!
Testers want to be able to emphasize the importance of a security bug and properly communicate the impact to their product. The default “bug” work item now has customized security fields so one can identify security severity, and security cause/effect (using STRIDE), and mark a bug as “Blocking” or “Not Blocking.” This feature allows tracking and searching for security-specific bugs.
For the management team there are the Final Security Review Report and Security Bugs Report, which provide an auditable set of artifacts that details security work completed as well as deferred tasks.
Actually, the new SDL template addresses the challenge of making the code more secure. More deailed overview may be found .
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 .
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 and .
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 , 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, , 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.
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 .
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:
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.
Well, while TFS 2010 is still in a “coming soon” state, let’s talk about TFS 2008. )
I’ve recently found a 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 , 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.
Well, everything indicates that the coming VSTS 2010 will be a really great release. Brian Harry in his latest blog post announces new awesome features of Team System 2010 stressing that VSTS 2010 marks a significant departure from 2008.
According to Brian there will be 3 really “new” areas. Investments in the testers’ tools, that help make them amazingly productive, a new area of investment called “Lab Management” - a set of features that makes it very easy for one to deploy and test software in many different configurations and then to debug and fix issues that the testing finds and a new area in architecture tools.
Here’s a list of what Brian calls “just new features in VSTS 2010”:
Architecture
Architecture Explorer
Layer diagram
Use case designer
Activity designer
Component diagram
Logical class designer
Sequence diagram
Modeling project system
UML Model explorer
Architecture validation during build
Test planning
Test case management
Test prioritization
Run management & reporting
Project quality reports
Manual test execution
Diagnostic recording (environment, video, etc)
UI Automation recording
Coded UI tests
TFS
Work item hierarchy & linking
Improved Agile template
MOSS & WSS Dashboards
Simplified reporting
Improved support for parallel development
Rollback
Build queuing and pooling
Gated checkin
Simplified setup
Scale out of web and data tiers
Admin console
Project move/archive/restore
+1 703.350.4150
))
In his Friday’s , 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. 
Hi there!
entries or 
