Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
TFS "Build Recipes" site launched
One of the most common areas for questions around TFS is using the TFS automated build system. How do I build .NET 1.1 apps with TFS 2005/TFS 2008? How do I build VS 2005 solutions with TFS 2008? How do I customize the build number Team Build generates? How do I build C++ projects with Team Build? How do I build Java projects with Team Build? And on and on... To help fill this gap, one of our MVPs, Grant Holliday, has launched a new collaborative site to collect people's questions, answers and general guidance around using TFS's automated build system. I expect it's going...
Comparison of VS 2008 client products
We've gotten quite a few requests from customers over the past couple of months for more information comparing each of the VS 2008 product offerings. We have just published a pretty massive feature comparison to help you pick the product that is right for you. This comparison only includes the client products - not the server products like TFS.Brian
Requirements management with Team System
Here's a nice blog series I ran across on requirements management with Team System, Team Foundation Server and some 3rd party products. We are also working on a whitepaper to provide an overview of this. http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-1-of-4-overview.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-2-of-4-tfs-out-of-the-box.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-part-3-of-4-integrations.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2007/11/06/requirements-management-in-tfs-pa...
VS 2008 Design time performance improvements reported
It's nice to see that people in the "real world" are seeing benefits from our efforts to improve performance in VS 2008. http://blogs.conchango.com/johnrayner/archive/2008/01/28/Design_2D00_time-perf-improvements-in-Visual-Studio-2008.aspx Brian
TFSAdmin Updated for TFS 2008
The popular TFS add-on for administering permissions across TFS, SQL Server Reporting Services and Sharepoint has been updated to support TFS 2008. The tool, call TFSAdmin, is available on CodePlex here: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Home Eventually, we plan to make this kind of functionality part of the product, but for now this is one of the best tools available for managing it. Brian
A customer's experience with TFS and Teamprise for Java development
Yesterday someone forwarded me a link to a Minnesota user group presentation on using TFS and Teamprise in a mixed .NET and Java shop. Being, admittedly, somewhat biased, I thought it was a terrific presentation on their experiences and felt is was worth sharing. If you (like so many organizations) do both .NET development and Java development, TFS + Teamprise can be a terrific solution for you. The one thing that made me feel bad was that they mentioned they had problems with TS Web Access and Firefox. I've asked the team to look into that (contacting the author if necessary) to understand it a...
TeamSpec by Personify Design is Shipping
Managing requirements is a hot topic with software development teams these days. I get a lot of questions from people about how to use TFS to manage requirements. When we think about requirements management, we break it into two parts - Elicitation/Capture and Analysis/Traceability. Today TFS really has no feature for elicitation - you can use standard work item entry forms but many business analysts consider that too clunky. There are many ways to capture requirements. Some people prefer pictures, some to rely mostly on mind maps and some on Word documents. Today a new option for ma...
New features to understand branching/merging
Back around the Holidays I promised 3 "surveys" but I actually only described 2 of them. I've finally gotten around to writing up the 3rd one. In our next release, we are building a slew of new features designed to make managing branching and merging simpler. Right now I'm focused on features to help you understand what branches you have, how they relate, what merges have happened, what hasn't yet, etc. Our approach to this problem has been to do a scenario based analysis of the problems people face and build solutions optimized for different scenarios. This is as opposed to trying to buil...
Checking your TFS Version and Extending Trials
Update: With Team Foundation Server 2010, you no longer need to download and run the TFSVersionDetection.exe tool as this functionality is baked into the Team Foundation Server administration console. See this post for more detail: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/05/07/extending-trials-of-tfs-2010.aspx As with Team Foundation Server 2005, we are publishing a utility that you can run on your TFS 2008 server to determine what version of TFS it is and, if it is trial, how many days remain until it expires. It also enables you to extend trials by 30 days. The program is called TFSVersionDetection...