May 2007 | Brian Harry's Blog

TFS Best Practices

Brian HarryMay 24, 2007May 24, 200705/24/07

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team, in concert with the TFS team and a panel of customer reviewer has just released a terrific document on TFS Best Practices. This is distinct from the TFS help on MSDN in the sense that it is not "How-to" guidance but is conceptual information and recommendations for how to use TFS to fit you

SnagIt! integration with TFS

Brian HarryMay 24, 2007May 24, 200705/24/07

I just got mail from TechSmith - makers of SnagIt! that they have added support for Team System. Being an occasional user of SnagIt! myself, I tried it out on our dogfood server and it worked like a charm. SnagIt! allows you to take screenshots and then automatically create a bug with the screenshot attached at the click of a butto

May DevDiv Dogfood Statistics

Brian HarryMay 16, 2007May 16, 200705/16/07

It's been a pretty uneventful month on our Dogfood server. I almost decided not to post about it but I figured what the heck. The most exciting thing is that we have our Orcas Beta 2 dogfood server upgrade happening this weekend. This should be an indication to you that we think our Orcas Beta 2 server is approaching ready.&n

Work Item Creator is now on CodePlex

Brian HarryMay 15, 2007May 15, 200705/15/07

I mentioned this tool a month or two ago. It's a cool tool that allows hierarchical organization of work items and other relationship management. You can find the project here. These are pretty common feature requests and a big area of focus for us in our Rosario release. Here is a screen shot on the UI portion of the tool:

Replaying your Orcas Beta 1 feedback

Brian HarryMay 14, 2007May 14, 200705/14/07

OK, I've now processed all of the feedback and written one-off responses to many of the specific questions. I appologize if I missed any. I want to thank all of you who took the time to provide feedback. It is tremendously appreciated and the best way I know of for us to learn and get better. Here I will summarize and play back wha

What's up with Orcas Beta 1?

Brian HarryMay 10, 2007May 10, 200705/10/07

We released Orcas Beta 1 a few weeks ago now and I'm really surprised at how little feedback I've heard. I'm curious what's going on. Are people too busy to mess with it? Has releasing all of the CTPs ahead of time taken the excitment out of playing with the Beta? Is it so unbelievably good that you are stunned into sil

Teamprise announces a Java SDK for Team Foundation Server

Brian HarryMay 9, 2007May 9, 200705/9/07

Yesterday Teamprise announced the availability of a Java SDK for building TFS based applications. You can read about it here: http://www.teamprise.com/news/2007/05/teamprise_announces_java_sdk_f.html Availability is targeted for later this year. They seem to be taking the same approach we took. They had to build a set of APIs

Managing Quality (part 7) – Code Coverage

Brian HarryMay 7, 2007May 7, 200705/7/07

Code coverage is a multi-edged sword :) There is no one right answer for how to do it and there are many ways to misuse it. Here I'll talk about how to think about code coverage and then talk about what we do and reports we use to track it. Let's say your test pass rate is 99.9%. Is that good? Well, maybe. It's no

All Orcas Beta 1 downloads are now available

Brian HarryMay 3, 2007May 3, 200705/3/07

It has taken a while to get all of the downloads finalized but they are done. In addition to the VPCs that were available a week or two ago, we now have all of the installation packages for those that want to install it themselves. The main Beta 1 page has not yet been updated with the last link but you'll find the final down load

Want to learn about the TFS Warehouse?

Brian HarryMay 2, 2007May 2, 200705/2/07

One of the devs on the TFS data warehouse team has just started blogging. He plans to blog "how to" and conceptual explanations around the warehouse for a while. He posted his first blog post yesterday. It is an overview of 4 of the TFS warehouse perspectives and explains when you would use each one and demonstrates building

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