Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

An Introduction to Team Foundation Server Version Control from a Visual SourceSafe User’s Perspective

Steven St. Jean has just posted a great document that helps users make the move to Team Foundation Server's version control.  While his goal is to help VSS users, this document will help users moving from a lot of other source control systems as well, such as Star Team.  He includes lots of screen shots.I'd highly recommend this to ...

Assigning work items for failed builds

Steven St. Jean has written a nice post about how to assign to a particular person the work item that's created for a failed build.  When he talks about the name for the Assigned To field, it must match the name that's displayed in work item tracking.  WIT shows the display name for a user, rather than the shorter domain login (aka ...

Creating a new server from an old one: Beware of the InstanceId

[UPDATE 8/23/14] The MSDN topic Move Team Foundation Server has the information about cloning TFS 2013. Today, that info is in the Q&A section at the bottom of that page.[This post contains instructions for TFS 2005/2008 and TFS 2010, which is in a separate section below]Grant Holliday wrote a post called, TFS InstanceId, ServerMap.xml and...

Understanding port configuration for Team Build

Etienne Tremblay, a Microsoft MVP, put up a nice Visio diagram showing the ports used by Team Build and the direction that must be opened for each.  Check it out! Team build the ins and outs So we learn stuff everyday... well I hope.  Here is a bit of insight on Team Build, specifically the ports that need to be opened for ...

How to use the new Custom Controls in Work Item Forms (SP1)

Naren Datha<, a dev who works on the WIT client, has written a post on how to use the new work item tracking custom controls that are introduced in SP1 beta (he previously mentioned some ideas for custom controls).  He provides an overview, details on how to create custom controls, some hints for troubleshooting, and a sample in a zip ...

Adding a path filter to a CheckinEvent subscription using bissubscribe

This week, a couple of people asked (forum post 1 and forum post 2) how to subscribe to the CheckinEvent notification when there's a checkin under a particular tree.  The first person wanted to filter by path in order to kick off continuous integration.  The second person wanted to filter by path for email subscriptions.Here's the ...

SP1 beta is now available

For Team Build users, I'll spare you the suspense and tell you that there are no meaningful changes in Team Build itself in SP1.  There are changes in other parts of the system, though, that will be of some benefit.Version control users will get a number of fixes, but most are related to scalability.Brian Harry described many of the ...