Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Cool checkin policy
Someone forwarded this link to me the other day. We get requests fairly often for a checkin policy that enforces comments. Often enough that we released one as part of our Power Tools a few months ago. However, this one looks better than ours. I haven't played with it but it looks good. I thought I'd pass it along in case you want to check it out.Brian
Orcas and Team Projects
One of the concerns I hear pretty frequently is about the number of Team Projects that a TFS server will support. Bill Essary wrote an extensive paper a while back on what limits TFS has, why and what behavior you will see as you approach and exceed the "limits". Tackling this problem was not one of our objectives in Orcas. We've targeted Rosario as our release to really eliminate this limit for all practical purposes. None-the-less, some of the changes we've made will help. First, we made some performance improvements to how we manage work item meta-data. We did this to generally improve ...
Cool tool for requirements test coverage
A few days ago someone forwarded me some links to a tool for determining test coverage (code coverage) on requirements rather than assemblies, classes and methods (which VSTS provides out of the box). I finally got a chance to look over it today. It looks pretty cool. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical about annotating every class/method with the requirement number but that might work out. It would be very interesting to try it out on a project. There's no question reporting the test coverage by requirement/scenario is way more meaningful to managers, project sponsors and users than...
Reminder – MSDN Chat today
I wanted to remind everyone that we have 2 MSDN chats with the Team System team today. The first is at 10:00am pacific time and the second at 4:00pm pacific time. I will definitely be at the first but may not make the second as it is at 7:00pm eastern time (where I am). See this post for more details.Brian
TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit is Available!
Last week we released the "final" version of the TFS Migration & Synchronization Toolkit. I say "final" because nothing is ever final (particularly when we provide source and put it on CodePlex :)). The toolkit is designed to make it easy to do both 1 way and bidirectional synchronization of work item tracking and version control data between TFS and other systems. We've used this tool kit (and previous incarnations of it) to build several tools and feedback on it has been very good. I remember a report of someone building a tool to migrate PVCS data into TFS. They claimed it was a ver...
June DevDiv Dogfood Statistics
Orcas Beta 2 has been deployed on our dogfood server for about a month now and has been running quite well with very few patches. We've been focusing primarily on cleaning up the event log and making sure we fix any bugs generating event log entries, making appropriate eventlog entries clear and actionable and removing spurious ones. I think I've mentioned before that increased adoption of TFS within DevDiv has been stalled for the past several months as the division has been totally focused on getting Orcas finished. It's performance review time of the year at Microsoft and as part of that process So...
Team System product group chats on July 3rd
The next set of Team System chats with the product group will be on July 3rd. We're continuing the new tradition of 2 chats at different times to help accomodate people in different timezones around the world. Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3rd , 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones -and- Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones Unfortunately I had to miss the last chat but I think I will be at this ...
Using Subversion clients with Team Foundation Server
There a new and very interesting project on CodePlex today. It's a "bridge" that allows Subversion clients (like TortoiseSVN) to work against a TFS server. This project has been created by the team that develops CodePlex itself due to the popularity of Subversion clients. This bridge works at the protocol level by transforming the SVN protocol to the TFS protocol and back. It's still in it's infancy but it's something worth keeping an eye on.Here's the project: http://www.codeplex.com/SvnBridgeKeep in mind, of course, that using it still requires a TFS CAL, sorry - no free lunch here :)Let...
Updated Quiescing patch released
We're now one step closer to the end of my humiliation :) The updated quiescing patch has now been released and is available for all to use. It should address many of the issues people have had with installing TFS 2005 SP1. If you've already successfully installed SP1, you don't need to go back and mess with it, but you should install the new quiescing patch before you apply any new fixes or service packs. Below you'll find a bunch of details on the patch. I'm told that the one remaining issue is very rare and easily remedied. The fix for it was deemed a substantial change and likely...