Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

Team Build blogger: Aaron Hallberg

Aaron Hallberg, a developer working on Team Build, has taken the plunge and started a blog.  Those of you who frequent the MSDN Team Build forum will probably recognize the name.  You now have a blog to go with the name!After getting post #1 out of the way, Aaron shows you how to insert custom build step from a custom task. ...

Two good posts: Building projects with shared code and using Web Application Projects (WAP)

Last week, the folks at Vertigo Software wrote a couple of really good posts involving Team Build.The first one, written by Jeff Atwood, is about building projects that have code shared from a different team project.  The crux of the problem is that in v1 Team Build doesn't allow mappings in the Workspace.xml file to span team ...

New Team Build content on MSDN

The VSTS User Education blog announced new MSDN content on using and customizing Team Build.  Check it out!New Team Foundation Build Customization Content on MSDN We are adding new content on explaining Team Founadation Build customization targets and tasks. Check out the following topics on MSDN: Understanding Team Foundation ...

Finding the changes between two labels in TFS version control

Carl Daniel (code) and Robert Downey (code) each wrote and posted code to show the changesets between two labels in TFS version control.  They each took the same basic approach: call QueryLabels() to get the set of items in each label, find the highest changeset version for each set of items, and then call QueryHistory() with the range of...

Dev lead for Team Build

For three years I worked on Team Foundation Server Version Control.  Most of my contributions were to the version control object model, the tf.exe command line, and general infrastructure.  After v1 shipped in March, we reorganized the TFS organization. Version 1 of TFS Team Build was developed by a small team in India, led by Gautam...

Check-in policy: Requiring a comment

A check-in policy to require a comment has always been a frequent request.  Jeff Atwood has posted a convenient installation package (.msi) for James Manning's check-in policy to require a comment. Installing the Check for Comments Check-In Policy In a previous entry on adding a new check-in policy, I provided the source code for a ...

A tool for reporting expiration dates for RC and RTM trial editions of Team Foundation Server

As some customers have found out the hard way, the TFS release candidates have started to expire without warning at the end of the 6 month (180 days) period.  The TFS trial edition (RTM) will start to expire next month, again without warning.  It also expires 6 months after installation.This morning, Brian Harry posted a tool that ...

Combining OneNote and Outlook would make OneNote very useful

I've written before about putting files directly into Outlook to make them securely available at work and at home.  Part of the reason for that is to have documents that just contain my thoughts on changes we should make, features we should consider, and so on.  Those are the kinds of things that would fit well into OneNote.&...

Squeet: Get RSS feeds in your inbox

I tried using an RSS aggregator, but it didn't fit the way that I wanted to work.  All of the feeds are trapped on the machine running the aggregator.  I wanted to be able to get to them from work and home.  Web-based aggregators solve that issue but still fell flat for me because I never remembered to go check them.  ...