I posted recently on how you make a field on a work item read-only. The example that I used for this post was the Estimate field. When I set up the current project in VSTS (we are using the CMMI process template) a few months ago, I was not able to get the Estimate field to match the Baseline created in my project plan. I assumed that the estimate field was not mapped correctly and had decided that I would post on how to map this. What I found is that the Baseline field is in fact mapped to a field...

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I have been installing Team Foundation Server since Beta 2, so I have seen the installation go from very difficult to quite easy. One issue that we came across at my client site was that the default installation put all of the sharepoint and vsts databases on the system partition (aka C: drive). To fix this is a simple task. Login to the SQL Server 05 Management Studio as an Administrator. Expand the database folder. Right click on each of the following databases and select Tasks | Take offline:...

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At the end of May something new for VSTS will be announced. I am quite excited about this. I will be blogging about it soon... Happing Coding

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I was in a meeting yesterday where I and a person from Microsoft were presenting on Team System to one of our clients. During the presentation I found out a nice piece of information about companies who already have MSDN Universal subscriptions. Microsoft is automatically upgrading each of your Universal subscriptions to one of the versions of Team System (Architect, Tester or Developer). I also understand that you can upgrade to Team Suite for around $1000. It is also cheaper to go ahead and get...

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I have been doing a few web casts for Team System recently and found out that presenting from a VPC over LiveMeeting is absolutely horrible. I have a 3.4 gig laptop with 2 gigs of RAM, so my machine is no slouch. My Team System VPC is a 2003 Server with TFS and Visual Studio Team Suite installed and it just would not run when recording the web cast. I am about solutions though, and I found a better way to do this. What I did was I installed Team Suite on my Laptop and ran the 2003 Server in VPC and...

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I had an interesting issue with Visual Studio recently. I installed the SQL Server 2005 Management studio before I installed Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. Once I installed Visual Studio, I had nothing under the VB or C# Project Types when I created a new project (File | New Project). The fix to this issue is very simple. Close Visual Studio. Go to the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt. Type devenv.exe /installvstemplate. Problem Solved! Happy Coding...

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I just finished reading a book called "Monday Morning Leadership" by David Cottrel. The book is an accounting of a turning point in Mr. Cottrel's management career which came about because he sought out and worked with a mentor. This is a great book for any aspiring leader because it talks about the things that differentiate a manager from a leader. We have this book in the SARK library, and I suggest that if you are interested in leadership principles or becoming a better consultant, you check this...

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Team Build is a very powerful tool, but it does not do scheduled builds out of the box. Fortunately, creating a scheduled build is very easy. With my current project, I have created a Build Type called "DailyBuild." I want this build to run each day at 3PM so that I can make sure no changes checked in during the day have broken my application. So here is what I did to achieve this. I created a batch file that contains the following and saved it on my Build server's D drive (hence the C:). @echo off...

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Here is an interesting issue that I came across recently. My Team Foundation Server had been installed with a email server that it could not get to. I had to change the server name because I could not get any Alerts to work. To change this value for the Foundation Server (at least with the RC) then I had look in the web.config under the Services folder under the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server folder. To find this, I just searched for web.config and found the correct folder. The key used...

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As my current project moves into the testing phase, I am reminded of the importance of a well documented bug report. A bug represents a defect in a piece of hardware or software. The term "bug" most likely originated in the engineering community as a term used to describe a mechanical malfunction. Thomas Edison, in one of his letters, used the term to describe some problems with one of his inventions in 1878. So why do we need to spend time documenting a bug? The answer is easy if you think about...

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LI downloaded the Conchango Scrum template for Team System and I can tell you that I am very disappointed. Let me first start off by saying that I think that Scrum is a very powerful and easy to implement Agile methodology. One of the problems that I have with the Conchango template is that it does not use Areas or Iterations. Another problem related to the lack of Iterations is that there is a Sprint Work Item. So as far as I can tell, if I want to create a new Sprint, I have to create a new sprint...

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I had an interesting issue with Visual Studio recently. I installed the SQL Server 2005 Management studio before I installed Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. Once I installed Visual Studio, I had nothing under the VB or C# Project Types when I created a new project (File | New Project). The fix to this issue is very simple. Close Visual Studio. Go to the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt. Type devenv.exe /installvstemplate. Problem Solved! Happy Coding...

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