Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Replaying your Orcas Beta 1 feedback
OK, I've now processed all of the feedback and written one-off responses to many of the specific questions. I appologize if I missed any. I want to thank all of you who took the time to provide feedback. It is tremendously appreciated and the best way I know of for us to learn and get better. Here I will summarize and play back what I heard. I will try to clarify and explain our current and future approaches to a few things. Not enough time Well, I can certainly relate to that. I have the same problem. I can only test drive a few things a year. I hate to admit it but I was one of the slacke...
What's up with Orcas Beta 1?
We released Orcas Beta 1 a few weeks ago now and I'm really surprised at how little feedback I've heard. I'm curious what's going on. Are people too busy to mess with it? Has releasing all of the CTPs ahead of time taken the excitment out of playing with the Beta? Is it so unbelievably good that you are stunned into silence? Are you just waiting for Beta 2? I'm really interested to hear what you think about it. Or why you haven't provided any feedback (understanding that may help us make it easier for you). Please share your thoughts - point me at your blog with feed...
Teamprise announces a Java SDK for Team Foundation Server
Yesterday Teamprise announced the availability of a Java SDK for building TFS based applications. You can read about it here: http://www.teamprise.com/news/2007/05/teamprise_announces_java_sdk_f.html Availability is targeted for later this year. They seem to be taking the same approach we took. They had to build a set of APIs to build their client on anyway so they are making those APIs available for other people to use to build custom applications on. It's always amazing to me how many custom development tools teams need to help make their development processes efficient. In last mo...
Managing Quality (part 7) – Code Coverage
Code coverage is a multi-edged sword :) There is no one right answer for how to do it and there are many ways to misuse it. Here I'll talk about how to think about code coverage and then talk about what we do and reports we use to track it. Let's say your test pass rate is 99.9%. Is that good? Well, maybe. It's not nearly enough information to know. Are the tests testing the primary user scenarios? Do you have enough tests? Are you missing testing on entire modules? Code coverage is one tool in the toolshed to help answer the question "Is that good?" Code cove...
All Orcas Beta 1 downloads are now available
It has taken a while to get all of the downloads finalized but they are done. In addition to the VPCs that were available a week or two ago, we now have all of the installation packages for those that want to install it themselves. The main Beta 1 page has not yet been updated with the last link but you'll find the final down load (the WinRAR image for the VSTS Team Suite SKU here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F10FB5DF-E369-4DB4-B9A7-845DBF793368&displaylang=en I'm really eager to hear what you think of Orcas Beta 1. I did some web searches a few days ago and was ...
Want to learn about the TFS Warehouse?
One of the devs on the TFS data warehouse team has just started blogging. He plans to blog "how to" and conceptual explanations around the warehouse for a while. He posted his first blog post yesterday. It is an overview of 4 of the TFS warehouse perspectives and explains when you would use each one and demonstrates building reports against them. Check it out! http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/04/30/understanding-the-tfs-cube.aspx Brian
Changing a User's Display Name
Those of you who have tried changing people's display name in active directory have noticed that TFS does not automatically pick up that change and propogate it to all of the appropriate places. It does pick it up and the pick list for the assigned to field, etc will be updated but existng bugs won't be updated, alert subscriptions aren't updated, etc. We are working on a long term fix to make TFS automatically pick it up and propagate it across the entire system. However, in the mean time, we have a stop gap measure. We have written a tool called TFSWitDisplayNames that can help you chang...
Chicago VSTS user group
Clark Sell sent me the following announcement and asked me to publicize it. I'm always happy to help bring attention to new and growing VSTS user groups. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System is the best integrated software development platform to build the mission-critical applications that businesses depend on. It extends Visual Studio’s integrated and productive experience from the developer to the entire development team by delivering powerful new role-based tools for software architects, developers, testers and project managers. It also includes an integrated team server and customi...
Round One of Channel 9 Videos is Done
We've recently published the last couple of the first round of Channel 9 videos that Brian Keller taped a few months ago. Read about it on Brian's blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2007/04/26/more-channel-9-interviews-with-the-team-foundation-server-team.aspx Check out the full list here: https://channel9.msdn.com/tags/vsts Brian