Paul Hacker's Blog

TeamCM a new Team Foundation Version Control Tool

Paul Hacker — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:37:00 GMT

TeamCM (Beta) is a Windows application that facilitates merging by work item between branches in version control. Users merely select source and destination folders in version control, review the available work item merge candidates and select the work items to merge. The related changesets for the selected work items are automatically merged from the source into the destination. Although targeted at promotion modeling and release based on work items, this tool can simplify and process of merging based on work items. Rather than having to go through and merge each changeset individually, you can now choose to merge the whole work item.

To download TeamCM:

http://teamsystemrocks.com/files/12/tools/entry1431.aspx

For the TeamCM forum:

http://teamsystemrocks.com/forums/74/ShowForum.aspx

Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider Version 1.2 is available

Paul Hacker — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 02:30:00 GMT

This is straight from Ed Hintz's blog posting.

You can get it here.

Overview

The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider enables integrated use of Team Foundation Version Control with products that do not support Team Explorer integration.

This version (1.2) includes:

Enable handling branched solutions in Visual Studio 2003.
Fixed issues to enable provider to support Toad for SQL Server 2.0.
Enhanced the "Choose Folder in Team Foundation Server" dialog.
Fixed bug which prevented Properties Dialog from displaying local path.
Work Items Query list in the Checkin Dialog is loaded and saved on the disk.
"Get" operation performance improvements.
Defect fixes

Hey my Team System WorkItems got a HEMI

Paul Hacker — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

I was reading the latest MSDN and ran across a WorkItem tool named HEMI (the old WorkItem Move tool). This is a great little tool for moving WorkItems between projects on the same TFS server. It was developed by Eric Lee of previous MS fame and now on his own.
Seeing as I was curious as to just how good it worked, I had to try it out. I was pretty impressed with it. It allowed me to not only move workitems between projects, but to also decide what WorkItem type that I wanted to create in the target project. I went from a bug to a task and found that the fields that could map did and the others just seemed to drop off. This is of course what I expected to happen. Next I tried it with a custom WorkItem control that I had and again it mapped over, albeit dropping the custom control field and value.
During the process I was given the opportunity to link the new workitem back to the original, and I am glad because with out it I would have had no idea that the original workitem had a custom field in it. It also set the original field to a Moved state which I will find helpful when I try to query the moved items.
I guess it would be nice if the program would notify me that the workitem that I am moving has fields that do not map over and even nicer if it would add that info as either comments in the History section or apend it to the Description field so that the users see that there is other information that is relevent to the workitem without having to actually open the original to see if anything is missing. Guess thats V2 if the will be a V2 :-)!!

All said, I had not really heard much on this tool and I will be adding it to my arsenal of cool tools that I use with TFS. You can get more info and the tool at http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlee/archive/2006/11/20/work-item-moving-tool-is-back.aspx

The TestCase workitem

Paul Hacker — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:04:00 GMT

Sometime back I setup a client to use the Conchango Scrum template. I had to customize it for them and during that process I found that there is a TestCase workitem that was never implemented. I decided to load it into a test project to see what it offered. I was suprised to see that, while not complete, it did offer the ability to capture a nice amount of testing metrics. What else I liked about it is that it allows you to add test steps for doing manual tests. Now this is cool because the current manual test harness in TFS does not capture quite enough metrics. The other thing I like about it is that you can manage all the test cases for any Team Project in workitems. Basically add the workitems into TFS(or Excel if you know all the fields you want) then export them out into Excel and save off the workbook. Now say that for every iteration of the project, you want to run through the testcases, all you have to do is publish them back to TFS and they will be ready to go.

Grant it this workitem type needs to be customized, but it is a great start to managing testcases via workitems.

You can download them Scrum process template from http://www.conchango.com

-paul

TeamRM (Beta) for Visual Studio Team System released

Paul Hacker — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:47:00 GMT

Notion Solutions, Inc. announces the release TeamRM(Beta) for Visual Studio 2005. TeamRM(Beta) is a Visual Studio plug-in that will enable more robust work item management and visualization by allowing the user to create and manage Parent/Child and Link relationships between Team Foundation Work Items.

The main scenario for this would be to link any Work Item type with a Requirement Work Item type, although any Work Item types can be linked. TeamRM(Beta) provides a user interface in which users can drag and drop Work Items to create the relationships.

You can download the plug-in from http://teamsystemrocks.com/files/12/tools/default.aspx

Messenger Live and Vista compatability issue workaround

Paul Hacker — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 15:44:00 GMT

I recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate and I found that my Messenger Live Beta 8.1 keeps crashing. I guess this is not an issue for everyone, but it is for me. I Googled the problem and found a great post by Mary Jo Foley http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=103

This is the fix that Mary Jo put out there from MS. Read her post for all the details.

The Microsoft-suggested workaround:

1. Uninstall Flash Player (Click Start->Control Panel->Uninstall a Program, then select Flash Player)

2. Close Windows Live Messenger and any other programs that use Flash

3. Open Adobe public Flash Player beta site (http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html)

4. Click "Download Installer for Windows Active X" to install

It seems that Messenger is working much better and that I can actually use my sharing folders now (w00t !). Just wish they could play together nicely right out of the box.

Hope this helps

-paul

Install VSPackage msi on Vista

Paul Hacker — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 15:37:00 GMT

I have been working on a cool new plugin for Team Foundation Server and decided it was time to run the msi to see how it worked outside of the hive. I created the msi and tried to run it on my Vista machine and found that it kept failing to install. The reason for this is that it was not running as the Admin. When I right-click the msi there was no option to run it as the Admin, so I had to Google around to see what I could find out. I ran across a post (forgot the link) and found that I could kick off the install if I put the command in a batch file and ran that as the admin. Well it worked so here is what I did.

Open Notepad and enter the following:

msiexec /i <enter path to msi>

Save as MyVSPacakge.bat

right-click and select "Run as Administrator"

Thats it. Quite simple to get the install to work now.

Hope this helps

-paul