Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Hotfixes update
We've recently had a spike in hotfix publishing for TFS. At this point we have published all completed TFS 2008 hot fixes and are expecting a few more this week. We are still behind on publishing TFS 2005 hotfixes but at this point, I'm thinking it may not be worth a ton of effort on that since much of our user base has or is migrating to TFS 2008. Feedback on that thinking is welcome. At this point I am expecting we will stay up to date on publishing all new hotfixes. Here's the url for the TFS hotfixes: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?TagName=Hotfix%2ctfs Brian
2008 Beta Update
A few things that I've run across in the last few days... 1) If you have both TFS and Team Explorer installed on the same server, you may not upgrade just one of them to the SP1 Beta, you would need to upgrade both of them if you want to upgrade either of them. If they are on different machines, there is not a problem. 2) When installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta on top of Visual Studio 2008, VS user settings are reset to default VS settings. This bug is caused by code originally put in place to reset settings when upgrading minor version of VS, for example from VS Beta1 to VS Beta2 so that V...
stpSoft Releases ReqSheet for TFS based Requirements Elicitation
ReqSheet enables offline creation and editing of requirements. The tool manages a simple, lightweight requirements hierarchy and can be synchronized with TFS. The requirements "documents" can be emailed, shared via Sharepoint and more. Along with their storyboarding product, Reqsheet creates a great solution for requirements elicitation with TFS. Check out more at the stpSoft web site: http://www.stpsoft.co.uk/vsts/ Brian
VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 SP1 Beta is now available
Sorry for being a bit late to the game... I should have posted yesterday but I've been drowning. As you may already know, we released the Beta for 2008 SP1. I'm eager to have you try it out and give us feedback. You can find the list of new TFS features here. I do, however, want you to keep in mind that it is a Beta and you shouldn't expect a completely seamless experience. I installed the VSTS SP1 myself and it went pretty well. The main thing I noticed was that I installed and it rebooted and then I had to install again (and reboot again) - the first install was .NET 3.5 SP1;...
A new Team System Licensing Whitepaper is available
I know licensing around Team System continues to be a pain point. In an attempt to address issues with clarity and understanding, we've produced an updated whitepaper that includes all licensing updates for VSTS 2008. Please let me know if you have feedback.Brian
May '08 DevDiv TFS Dogfood Statistics
Today seems to be blogging day. Here's post #3 of 4 or 5 that are coming today. Sorry for the deluge but it's been a couple of weeks since I blogged. I think we are finally nearing the end of the full scale roll out of TFS to the Developer Division. Almost everyone working on the next version of VS/.NET are now on TFS. There's some other projects that have not switched yet but I expect most will before too long. The biggest sign of this continued growth is in # of Recent users (up 145). That's 145 more regular users this month than last month. The other number that staggering...
BizTalk Support with TFS
We get a reasonable amount of feedback from BizTalk users that would like a more seamless experience working with Team System and BizTalk. The number one complaint that I hear is that building BizTalk with Team Build is very difficult. The underlying reason for this is that BizTalk does not use msbuild for building their projects. I've been working with the BizTalk team for the past several months to try to figure out how to fit this support in. I'm very happy to say that I've just been informed that they will be getting it into the upcoming BizTalk Server 2006 R3. I think this will be a n...
Another TFS Spec Published
Last week, we published another new spec on "Properties" for TFS. This spec describes a new feature that allows you to associate properties with different artifacts in TFS. The include Files/folders, shelvesets, labels, branches, Workspaces, pending changes, etc. Ultimately, we hope to expand this to all artifacts in TFS. This spec is still in draft form - in fact we just reviewed it internally on Friday and there was a lot of feedback to simplify some aspects of it. We're very interested in your input as well. To get you thinking about what this might be used for, here are some exam...
Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Preview
The stream of new stuff coming out for VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 continues! - see my recent post on an update to the TFS Power Tools. It is time for me to tell you about what is coming in TFS 2008 SP1. The release of the Beta is very close (as always, don't ask me for a date but if you want to play with it when it comes out, start figuring out how you are going to find the time :)). TFS 2008 SP1 is going to be another fantastic release. In TFS 2005 SP1, we started the tradition of adding small, tactical features that address common customer requests or enable delivering new value out of band. In TF...