Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
The end of my humiliation is near?
Well, I've been doing everything I could to hide from my humiliation that was the install experience around TFS SP1. As you'll recall, the underlying problem was that the way it "quiesced" (deactivated) the server was not appropriate. It didn't work for servers that were in the process of being used. It didn't work for clustered servers. Etc. To make matters worse, it has taken months to address the issue. The primary problem was that once SP1 was behind us, the division was focused on other things and trying to turn the overall servicing orgs attention to "redoing" the TFS SP1...
GAT/GAX Support for Orcas
A few weeks ago (in a thread about Orcas feedback) I got several questions about GAT/GAX support. As promised I went and talked to the team about their plans and accelerating support. Their plan had been to support Orcas at RTM, but given the feedback you gave and after reviewing the effort involved, they've come back with a plan to do it sooner. Today they told me they believe they can have an Orcas compatible GAT/GAX available in about a month. So, keep your eyes and ears open for availability... Brian
Announcing Team Foundation Server <-> Project Server connector
Today we are announcing the availability of a connector between TFS 2005 and Project Server 2007. The goal of Team System is to conect together all of the people involved in software development projects and provide them the information they need, when they need it to make better decisions faster. Since the initial release of TFS 2005, it has supported integration with the Microsoft Project client - allowing project managers to access and enter data in TFS. Over the last year we've been hearing increasing requests from customers for a solution that better integrates with Project Server for a mor...
SourceSafe GDR coming
Richard Berg blogged today about the upcoming SourceSafe GDR. Think of it as a service pack for SourceSafe 2005. He's listed all of the bugs that we've fixed and some info on where the reports came from.Brian
Dry spell
It's been a bit of a blogging dry spell for me the last couple of weeks and I think it's going to continue to be for a bit longer. Sorry about that. It's just been really hectic. In a moment of insanity, I agreed to help someone work on a CodePlex project to hook TFS up to FrontPage server extensions so that you can use Visual InterDev with TFS. The project has been created (but not published yet, I think) and I've uploaded the initial framework for the solution. That accounts for several days over the last couple of weeks. In addition, I'm speaking at TechEd on Thursday and have bee...
TFS Best Practices
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 your development process. The release is in "Beta" now and we are taking feedback for further improvements. Please look it over and give us any feedback you have. It's pretty long (hundreds of pages) but it's organized well and you can go straight to the guidance yo...
SnagIt! integration with TFS
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 button - very nice. SnagIt! also has powerful capabilities for editing/annotating the screenshots. It's a nice tool. Check out the new update at: http://www.techsmith.com/community/blogcomments.asp?thread=356 Brian
May DevDiv Dogfood Statistics
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. There will be some more bug fixes before we are done with it but we are feeling pretty good about it. This upgrade is also the first to use the revamped setup and customer ready upgrade experience that will be available in Orcas Beta 2. It's been a good exer...
Work Item Creator is now on CodePlex
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: Share your thoughts if you try it out. Brian