Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
TFS "Change Language" tool
After we released TFS 2005, we shipped a set of guidance and tools for helping customers change their TFS server from English to a localized version. It was fairly "do it yourself", consisting of a lot of manual steps and a few tools to help you. None-the-less, many hundreds (maybe a couple thousand - I can't remember the number right now) people used it. The reason we did it was that, being the first version of TFS, and Betas being only in English, customers had no choice but to start with English if they wanted to use TFS. Once the localized versions were released, they wanted to move to...
Installing Sharepoint on Windows Server 2008
I saw an internal mail about this today and it seemed like something worth sharing. Now that Sharepoint is no longer included in Windows Server 2008, you have to install it yourself. Further, when installing TFS on Windows 2008, the TFS installation process won't automatically install Sharepoint (this is due to the fact that there was a great deal of uncertainty at the time about exactly what was being done with Sharepoint in Windows 2008 and we had to take the safe route of not messing with it). The issue is this. If you try to install WSS 3.0 on Windows 2008, it will not install. It will...
A new community project based on TFS
Martin Woodward brought a new community project to my attention today. The project is based on the concept of an internal tool we have here at Microsoft called "Gauntlet". Gauntlet was orginally created by the IE team in the 1996-1997 timeframe and has gone through many interations and is now widely used internally (although there are many variations of it - a popular one of them is now called SNAP). The basic idea is that if you have a big team, you can't afford to have anyone break the system (build break, key test failures, etc). The cost is too high because it affects too many people. ...
Visual SourceSafe 2005 update released
Yesterday we released an update to VSS 2005 to address customer reported issues and ensure that it will work seamlessly with VS 2008. Any licensed SourceSafe 2005 user can download and install the update here. You can read more about the update on Richard's blog post. We're eager to hear any feedback you have. Thanks, Brian
December '07 DevDiv Dogfood Statistics
The massive spike that I've been foreboding for a long while now has started. In the last month the momentum towards moving the entire division over to TFS has really picked up. A significant fraction of the branches for the development of the next version of Visual Studio/.NET Framework have been created. Overall, I expect this ramp up phase will last another 2-3 months - right now a lot of planning is happening; development is slowly ramping up. Demonstrating this change, you can see an increase of over 32 million in the number of files and 154 million in number of local copies. Just this we...
TFS Statistics update
Long ago I published a post on some of the queries I use to monitor data on our internal servers. Someone asked me to update it for TFS 2008 and I went back and tried them. Only a few needed tweaks. Here's an update on the queries.Here they are... use TfsWorkItemTracking -- Users with assigned work items: select count(distinct [System.AssignedTo]) from WorkItemsAreUsed with (nolock) -- # of work items: select count(*) from WorkItemsAreUsed with (nolock) -- Work Item versions: select count(*) from (select [System.Id] from WorkItemsAreUsed with (nolock) union all select [System.Id] from Wor...
Support period of TFS 2008 Beta 2
Back in August I announced that Beta 2 was a "Go-live" release of TFS for customers to use in production. Because of this we arranged for Customer Support Services (CSS) to support TFS Beta 2. Now that TFS 2008 has been released I want to clarify when support for Beta 2 will end. As announced earlier, the Beta 2 release is set to expire on March 15, 2008. In accordance with this, we've decided to terminate support for Beta 2 on that same date. You will continue to be able to call CSS with Beta 2 issues until then. That said, I strongly encourage you to move to the released buil...
Tips for installing VSTS Web Access
As I hear about issues people run across installing VSTS Web Access, I'll post here guidance to help you be successful. 1) VSTS Web Access (like TFS 2008) does not currently support running under 64-bit. Our recommendation is that you install it on a 32-bit system. I'm told that you actually can get it to work on a 64-bit system by, after installing it, going to the IIS manager, openning the app pool, clicking "advanced settings", clicking "Enable 32-Bit Applications, and then recycling the app pool. I haven't tried this myself so you'll be a bit on untrodden ground if you decide to go this way....
VSTS Web Access Power Tool for Team System 2008 released!
Today we are releasing the "final" TFS 2008 based release of the Web Access Power Tool. I put "final" in quotes because the release model for Power Tools is a little different than for our major product versions. Rather than releasing "big" releases every couple of years, we release smaller ones as needed. So I fully expect there will be a few updates to the current tool before the Rosario version ships. This final release is very similar the the last CTP we released but is now complete and ready for prime time. In addition to fixing as many bugs as we could find, this new release of Web A...