Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
Team Project and Branching Guidance
Among the most common questions I hear about TFS are "How do I structure my Team Projects?" and "How do I organize my branches?" Clearly both are very related questions. We've put together some whitepapers to help give some people some guidance on both questions. You'll find the umbrella whitepaper here: http://www.codeplex.com/BranchingGuidance/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Guidance%20for%20Structuring%20Team%20Projects We'd very much appreciate your feedback, Brian
Update on our upcomming Team System Chat
We've decided to add another Team System Chat today at a time that is more convenient for our Asian customers. It's probably still not perfect but should help. The additional chat will be on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones Based on participation level, we'll decide how often we want to continue this idea. Brian
A new TFS Sidekick release from Attrice
Our friends at Attrice have released version 1.3 of their TFS Sidekicks tools. These tools are great add-ons to TFS that add great functionality to Team Explorer. This new version includes a "shelvesets sidekick" and improvements to the labels sidekick. Download it and check it out.Brian
Upcoming MSDN Chat on VSTS
Join us for a live chat on Friday 4/27 from 10:00am - 11:00am PDT. The products groups will be on hand to answer any questions you have about Team System. This is the first chat since Orcas Beta 1 was released. Come and find out the latest news. Sadly I won't be able to be there this time as I will be on an airplane on Friday (and they still don't have standard wireless on airplanes yet :(). Have a great time without me :) Brian
Migration and Synchronization Toolkit Prerelease
For the past 6 or 9 months we've been working on something we call the Migration & Synchronization toolkit. It is a framework for building tools that either convert from other systems to TFS or synchronize other systems with TFS. We frequently think about it as a platform for building tools to migrate from alternative tools - competitors, open source tools, internal tools, etc. But it can also be used to synchronize TFS with other data stores that you have no intention of moving off of. Examples include Project Server, Sharepoint document libraries and lists, Help desk systems, Financi...
Visual Studio Code Name Orcas Available!
Orcas Beta 1 is now available for download. I don't think all of the SKUs are available yet - they will be dribbling out over the next week or so but the VPCs for VSTS Team Suite and TFS server are available now. To a first approximation (the primary difference being minor bug fixes) these TFS server bits are the same ones deployed on our production DevDiv dogfood server. One thing to be aware of is that we have not yet released the upgrade tools to upgrade from TFS 2005 - those will come with Beta 2. You can read here for more info on what's included (and not) in the TFS Orcas Beta 1 release. P...
First TFS Best Practices Analyzer Success
We've been working for the past several months on a new Power Tool - a TFS Best Practices Analyzer. The goal of this tool is to diagnose TFS configuration and operation problems quickly and easily. As you probably know, TFS is a pretty complex installation and has many places where things can go wrong. We released the first version of the tool to our Customer Support Services organization (CSS) this week. I just got mail that they've had their first success. Someone was trying to move TFS from one server to another and was having problems. In 5 minutes the tool identified w...
New Fiddler Release
This is my last post for today, I promise. But Ed Glas (on the VSTS Test team) asked me to help publicize this. We recently posted a new release of Fiddler - a really nice web test recording tool. It was not written by the VSTS team but they have started contributing to it because it's a great tool. You can get it here: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/New features include: And you can read Sean's blog posts about it: Intro – http://blogs.msdn.com/slumley/archive/2007/04/17/recording-web-tests-with-fiddler.aspx Plugin - http://blogs.msdn.com/slumley/archive/2007/04/17/develo...
Managing Quality (part 6) – Community Feedback
I touched on one aspect of customer involvement in our quality efforts in my last post about Dr. Watson. There are a variety of other metrics we track and measure ourselves against that are more overtly community oriented. Before I drill into the metrics we track, let's talk a bit about what aspects of community we think about. Pre-releases - We have a variety of forms in which we provide pre-release software. We've done Betas for a long time and in recent years we started doing Community Technology Previews (CTPs). We target CTPs every month or two and they are just "points in time". ...