Our team at AJI Software has been hard at work over the past year on certifications and projects that has allowed us to reach Gold Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program. We have focused on providing services that not only assist in custom software development, but process analysis and mentoring. I definitely want to thank each one of our team members for all their work. We are currently the only Microsoft Gold ALM Partner for a 500 mile radius around Kansas City. If you or your team is...
Today I received an email from Microsoft stating that: Dear Jakob Ehn, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Studio ALM technical communities during the past year. This is incredibles news and I really want to thank both the people at Microsoft who nominated me and...
We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it...
There are pieces of information spread out on this in various postings for SQL Server Reporting Services used in Team Foundation Server. Here are two: Customizing Report Parameters for Team Foundation Server 2010 TFS 2010: Using Stories Progress in your Dashboards but scoped to Iteration or Areas I will attempt to pull together the essential information. First, there are two ways that SSRS reports filter on iteration and area path: …MDXParam (i.e. Query Based) parameter. For example, the Stories...
UPDATE April 8th 2012: April Update of Visual Studio 11 Beta. Added Code Contracts - released for Dev 11. New version of NuGet Manager This post is a list of the extensions I recommend for use with Visual Studio 11. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, last version, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 11 connected to a Team Foundation Server 11. Note that we now are at Beta time, and that also...
Recently, I came across an issue where I had to change the size limit for WorkItem Attachments in TFS 2010. I searched all around the internet only to find very little information around it which wasn’t clear honestly. So after breaking my head for sometime, I was successful in doing it. Here are my conclusions and the procedure to do it. 1. You DON’T 'have to' programmatically change it. You can do it directly from IIS webservices. 2. You CAN change it programmatically too, by making an entry into...
Yes, now more ways to get connected to TFS 2010. Up until now, if you have to connect to TFS 2010 from other platforms - be it Linux, Mac, Solaris etc., you had to purchase a CAL (Client Access License) or a 90-day free trial of the Team Explorer Everywhere 2010. You don't have to do that anymore. Microsoft has made it free and released an update with Team Explorer Everywhere with SP1. Here's the download link - http://www.microsoft.com/do... Have fun coding...
If you are interested in creating a new Team Project and playing around with TFS 2011, you can try http://tfspreview.com You’ll have to register and request for an invitation code. Last I read on Brian's blog there was a free invitation code , but I’m assuming its exhausted already. The invitation code was: TfsDecUpdate. I don’t think it works anymore. So you can register & request for one...
Start believing in ‘Karma’. The very fact that you are working on TFS and stumbled on my blog proves it. That’s the number one prerequisite as you work with TFS...
This past week was just massive in the amount of Betas, evaluations, review guides and educational material that were released. We saw Windows 8 come out in a Customer Preview, the same for Windows 8 Server. There are plenty of things to go over and review, but that is a number of posts coming. If you have been using the TFS Preview, then you pretty much had an idea what you would be looking for in TFS coming out and of course the announcement of TFS Express was exciting. Anyhow, here are a couple...
A year ago I blogged about how to manage your build process templates using the TFS API. The main reason for doing this is that you can (and should!) store your “golden” build process templates in a common location in your TFS project collection, and then add them to each team project that requires those templates. This way, you can fix a bug or add a new feature in one place and have the change affect all build definitions. However, by having the build process templates in a single location, the...
A while back I was helping a client upgrade SharePoint 2007 code to SharePoint 2010 and I came across this interesting problem. I was working web parts that were created in Visual Studio 2008 using WSPBuilder extensions. The first order of business was to convert them to Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 extensions. Why Use Visual Studio 2010 templates? There are two main reasons I highly recommend using Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 templates....
Let me start off by stating that I am in no way an expert on MSBuild, writing build scripts, MSDeploy, Web Deploy, etc. I learned a lot in this process about those things which helped me find a workable solution. I'm sure there are better ways to accomplish what I'm trying to do, but this is what I came up with. My goal in writing this is that someone will hopefully avoid wasting their time as I did trying to get app_offline.htm to work.For those of you who don't know what app_offline.htm is, it's...
You get an error message with Microsoft Test Manager 2010: Automatic connection to the following team project failed: <project_name> on server <tfs server>. Click refresh to display all currently available team projects, then connect to the project that you want to use. This error message displays everytime you are trying to connect to the MTM 2010 though you are able to connect to TFS successfully from the VS 2010. The issue doesnt goes off after installing the hotfix and deleting the...
The Problem After setting up a new instance of TFS I attempting to use the TFS 2010 Power Tools (Dec ‘11) Team Foundation Backups wizard. However, during the Backup Plan Wizard Readiness Checks, the “Grant Backup Plan Permissions” step failed with the error – Account… failed to create backups using path… The Fix Digging into the log created during the Readiness Check I found the following error - Error @xxx Microsoft.SqlServer.Managem... Backup failed for Server 'xxx'....
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Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans... mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;...
Most of us spend our time in Visual Studio writing .NET code within a Visual Studio solution. Given this situation we find it very easy to integrate with Team Foundation Server for our source control and have a well known work pattern. But what happens when you want to use TFS as source control for non-Microsoft development? The most important thing to remember is that source control should be as transparent as possible to the developer. If the particular language or product does not have an Integrated...
Back in 2009 I was tasked with automating database dictionaries and schemas outputs for the CI (Continuous Integration) Server called Hudson ( which is probably now owned by Oracle and will become a name like Jenkins, but I digress. CruiseControl and CruiseControl.NET for Windows is another popular free CI, both of which are superior to the lightweight CI of TFS ).I setup ANT scripts with regular expressions that would get called nightly to rebuild the creation of html and image files with the schemaspy...
The InvokeProcess activity is very useful when it comes to running shell commands and external command line tools during a build process. When it comes to integrating with TFS source control during a build, the TF.exe command line tool can be your friend, as it lets you do most of the usual stuff such as check-in, checkout, add, modify workspaces etc. However, it can be a bit tricky to handle the output from tf.exe, since it often produces warnings that is not necessarily a problem for your build....
When you place a Visual Studio solution into TFS or pull it down for the first time a default working path is set in the workspace mappings. There are times when you need to point source code to a new location. Once option you have is to simply use the Manage Workspaces dialog to edit the local folder for the your solution. Select your workspace. Click on the Local Folder and an ellipse button will appear to allow to set a new folder. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t seem to consistently...
The Objective Three of the 6 development teams using TFS are moving to a different network and domain. There is no on-line connection between the old (source) and new (target) networks. The objective was for the teams to come in Monday morning, bring up their development machine on the new network and have everything as it had been on the old network. Failed Approaches Clone the data tier and move the data tier to the new network. This failed because the procedures for moving the hardware to a new...
I’ll be running a Team Foundation Server 2010 Deep Dive class twice this spring in Stockholm at our friends at Cornerstone. The class is 4 days and we will be “diving deep” into all aspects of TFS 2010, including: Deployment Administration Source Control Check-in Policies Branching strategies Work Items Office integration Reporting Customization Team Build Working with build definitions Developing Custom Activities Automatic deployment Test Management Microsoft Test Manager Creating and running manual...
At my company we write a lot of tools and extensions that uses the TFS API to automate various things for us. A very common thing to automate is the creation of work items and the areas and iterations structure. Creating a work item using the TFS API is simple, just connect to TFS, get the WorkItemStore service object and create a new work item and set any fields that you want to: Creating a work item //Connect to TFS and get the WorkItemStore object var tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://localhost:8080/...
Scribe - Test Scribe is a documentation power tool designed to construct documents directly from TFS for test plan and test run artefacts for the purpose of discussion, reporting etc. Scribe only works with Microsoft Test Manager, so if you needed to generate documentation for TFS Builds, what options do you have? You could potentially modify the Build Process template to generate report documentation as the build is executed or you could use the TFS data warehouse to extract data to create rich...
I’ve used the platform for ClearQuest migrations to TFS and Subversion migrations to TFS. The setup for testing the configuration can be tricky to ensure you’re starting again from a blank slate. Problem I was puzzled after running a number of test migrations to find that no source code would be migrated for some team projects, but not others. I was starting with a new migration configuration, new destination team project and even a re-install of the platform and the SQL Server DB for the platform....
With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting…...
The latest release of the Community TFS Build Extensions include a brand new tool called Community TFS Build Manager and has been created for two reasons: An implementation of the Team Foundation Build API which is referenced by the Rangers Build Customization Guidance V2 (available H1 2012) Provide a solution to a real problem. The Community TFS Build Manager is intended to ease the management of builds in medium to large Team Foundation Server environments, though it does provide a few features...
Agile taught us to release early and release often, Agile also taught us to get the end user involved more frequently and directly. Goes without saying that release notes are an important part of any release. But what you don’t want to be doing is manually putting together the release notes with each frequent release you do. TFS lets you manage the application lifecycle with great ease & minimal administrative overhead, if your team is already checking in the code against work items and if you...
We needed to swap out the DB box. Our DB box runs SQL Server, SSRS and SSAS. The AT is on its own box and SharePoint is on its own box.NOTE: I will update the blog post per resolution of the issue :) The Microsoft procedure I used was: Restore Data to a Different Server or Instance Setup new DB box with WS08 R2 with all updates applied. Installed SQL SQL 2008 R2 on new DB box (same version as on the old DB box). Took TFS offline. Disabled the transaction backup job from existing backup plan (runs...
When Rob Conery left Microsoft I gave a blog retrospective on possible reasons behind his exit. Today I’m happy to reload the cannon and aim it square at the latest Microsoftie to hand in his blue badge – Phil Haack. Phil has been a huge part of why Microsoft MVC is a success, and his contributions have changed the way web development is done on the Microsoft platform. So why leave, and why leave to Github? Couldn’t he have just switched to the TFS team if he liked code repositories so much? Well,...
Brian Harry just posted an update on the latest version of the TFS 2010 Power Tools. This will most likely by the last version of the Power Tools for the TFS 2010 version, next version will target Dev11! The main improvements in this release are: Team Foundation Server Power Tools for Eclipse MSSCCI Provider for 64-bit IDE’s VS 2010 Power Tools update Improved Work item Search Best Practice Analyzer now also analyzes the integration with Project Server, if you are using it Check out the early Christmas...
Welcome to the hidden treasure of “MTM.config.exe” Navigate to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE” and open the 1. Can I change the number of Action Recording steps selected when a Bug is created? When you are exploratory testing using Microsoft Test Manager or performing a feedback session using Feedback Manager and decide to raise a bug or create a test case, the last 4*10 Action recordings are selected by default. You can change the number of action recordings selected...
In this blog post I’ll show you how to use the TFS 2011 API to get the Exploratory Testing & Feedback Manager session information programmatically. Introduction TFS 2011 includes Exploratory Testing and Feedback Manager, the first empowers the testers to explore the application and second empowers the stake holders to explore the application. This rhymes a bit… that’s because… under the hood both use the same infrastructure to drive and store the session information. If you try to run both at...
I often use the VS 2010/TFS 2010 evaluation virtual machines that Microsoft publishes every 6 months with the latest bits. It’s a great timesaver to use an image where everything is already setup and also contains a bit of sample data that is useful when you want to demo something for customers. There is one thing that has always been a, albeit small, but still very annoying problem and that is that the builds always partially fail when you start using the image. When you want to demo the powerful...
In this blog post I’ll be walking you through the process of customizing the TFS 2011 Scrum 2.0 Process Template to add a new work item type, introducing new work item queries, modifying existing queries, adding new reports, etc. To give you a bit of context, at the 2011 ALM Summit Anu Bharadwaj presented a talk on Exploratory Testing highlighting how the Team @ Microsoft took advantage of MTM 2011 to test various VS ALM products in the “fun” way by organizing “Testing Tours.” To dive deep in to...
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in;...
Our TFS instance had been humming along for some time when I noticed that the full and incremental cube refresh jobs started failing. Using Grant Holiday’s “Team Foundation Server 2010 Administrative Report Pack” I was able to better visualize and diagnose the problem. The Problem The full error message was - OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: Login timeout expired; HYT00; A network-related or instance-specific error has occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Server is not found...
UPDATE 10.01.2012: The issue has been resolved by Microsoft and will be addressed in patch soon. Here is the full description from the Connect site: “We've identified the rootcause. This bug was introduced in the compatibility GDR patch released for VS 2010 to work against 2011 TFS Server. We shall be releasing a patch soon. Till then, please follow the workaround mentioned to unblock yourselves. “ When setting up a physical environment for a new test controller on our TFS 2010 server, I ran into...
Anyone working with developing custom activities in TFS 2010 Build has run into the following dreadful error message when running the build: TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \TeamProject\MyBuildDefinit... Cannot create unknown type '{clr-namespace:[namespace]... What the error means is that when the TFS build service loads the build process template XAML for the build definition, it can’t create an instance of the customer workflow...
Of late am getting stung with a glucose 'ed question...Yes it was the engine that dragged me to rejuvenate...!!------------... out the Basic Elements of Configuration Management ??"------------------------... Initially, it wasn't influencing me to give a thought process. But later, it did.When i tried to dig into this question , a few were gushing out. They are (Click the Image for clear view)- Version...
PrairieDevCon is a great conference hosted in Canada a few times a year. For the first time it’s coming to Calgary in March and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve participated as a speaker in every PrDC to date (2 in Regina, 1 in Winnipeg), and that streak will continue into Calgary. In addition to the 2 conference sessions I’ll be doing: Why do we Suck at Estimating? And How to Get Better Evolve Your Code: Fundamental Design Principles I’m also doing a full day Pre-Con Workshop on TFS Build. I plan...
Is this blog post worth your time? It’s not challenging setting up the Load Test Rig in the Cloud, it’s more challenging to convince enterprises to embrace the cloud. Not all enterprises will accept their business critical applications being profiled from a VM hosted outside their network. Though through Windows Azure Connect you can join the Cloud hosted Role to the on premise domain effectively forcing the domain policies on the external VM but how many enterprises will authorize you to do this?...
Memory for managed code is handled by the garbage collector, but if you use any kind of unmanaged code, like native resources of any kind, open files, streams and window handles, your application may leak memory if these are not properly handled. To handle such resources the classes that own these in your application should implement the IDisposable interface, and preferably implement it according to the pattern described for that interface. When you suspect a memory leak, the immediate impulse would...
Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig. What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute...
So I was tasked with looking at converting 10 million tracks from mp3 320k to AAC and also Converting from mp3 320k to mp3 128k After a bit of hunting around the tool you need to use is FFMPEG Download x64 WindowsAlso for the best results get the Nero AACEncoder Download Now the command line STEP 1(From Flac)ffmpeg -i input.flac -f wav - | neroAacEnc -ignorelength -q 0.5 -if - -of output.m4aor (From mp3)ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -f wav - | neroAacEnc -ignorelength -q 0.5 -if - -of output.m4aNow the output.m4a...
On Tuesday November 22th, VISUG User Group has hosted an event at Microsoft Belgium about Hosted TFS by Hassan Fadili see http://www.visug.be/Eventde... This event was very interactive and many as 60 people have taken part. The topic was about Build, Relase and Deploy with TFS2011 and MS Deploy. A combination of Slides and Demo's was perfect to explain this common mechanism for developers.To learn more about this topic check the earlier article pubished by Hassan...
Article Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/c... TODO's in code should only be used for a short period of time to remind you that something needs to be done. They should be addressed as soon as possible. In order to know who owns a TODO task and how long it’s been outstanding, my company uses the following formatting standard: Format: // TODO : Owner Initials – Date Created – Description of task. Sample: // TODO : CM – 2011\11\22 – Move this class to a reusable location. Using this pattern makes...
USB Boot Disk When you look how to create USB Boot Disk on the web it is a nightmare Here is the easiest I use that works for all MS prods At a computer running Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008, run a command prompt as administrator and execute the following: Make Sure you have all explorer windows closed and nothing referencing the USB i.e a doc open in Word 1. C:\> diskpart DISKPART> list disk [Identify disk # of the USB key] DISKPART> sel disk 1 [assuming 1 was the # from...
Was working @ home and then arrived nice and early on Monday armed with all this good stuff I did on the weekend. Login,Headphones On, Check Mail and make cup of tea. Goto load up Solution I was working on the weekend@ home What the !!!... If you edit the unloaded Project you will find something like this For some Murphys rule reason even after hitting VS2010 with SP 1 my work box has lost MVC3 so thats why {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FF... is unknown This site has a list of the VS system guids...