Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

How to measure performance using the web service performance dialog

You may have read about the Team Foundation activity log, which is a database table containing the web service requests executed by the server (turning it on, interesting queries, and more interesting queries).  You may have also seen posts about turning on tracing, both server tracing (see Patrick Carnahan's first response)&...

Documentation error results in a build that never ends when building setup projects (.vdproj)

There's an error in the MSDN documentation on how to build Visual Studio setup projects with Team Build, which several customers have hit now (see this Team Build MSDN forum question).  The result is that the build hangs; it never returns.  The reason is that there's a line break in the MSBuild XML snippet on the MSDN ...

How to determine whether tests passed and building a specific version

Aaron Hallberg has written a couple of posts about Team Build that started with questions from users.  The first deals with how to determine, from code, whether tests passed. Determining Whether Tests Passed in Team Build In a forum post a while back, I laid out a method for determining whether tests had passed during a build.  More ...

VC API: CheckIn() may return 0

Back in March, I wrote a post called How to check in changes on behalf of other users.  Among other things, you'll find the documentation comments for the Workspace.CheckIn() method, which you'll notice is now on MSDN.  While that and How to validate check-in policies, evaluate check-in notes, and check for conflicts are ...

Sept. 6th Team System chat transcript is now available

Brian Keller mentioned that the transcript of the Sept. 6th chat is now available. Team System "Chat" transcript now available It looks like the the transcript from our September 6th "Chat" on MSDN is now available. It was great meeting everyone who could make it - we had nearly 150 people during the live session which is simply incredible! ...

TFS API: How to choose between TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer() and the TeamFoundationServer constructor

Occasionally the question of whether to use the TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer() method or the TeamFoundationServer constructor comes up, and someone recently asked this question on an internal list.  The answer depends on the needs of the application that you are writing.  In this post, I'll discuss the main differences ...

Building web projects with Team Build

Bernardo Heynemann wrote a nice pair of posts on using Team Build to build and deploy web projects.  While he uses the recently-released continuous integration tool from Notion Solutions (Team CI), there are a number of continuous integration tools for Team Build. Team Build 101 (Part 1 of 2) Team Build 101 (Part 2 of 2) Today we engaged ...

Customizing the new TreeDiff power toy

If you haven't seen the new TreeDiff, you can see a screen shot in Brian Harry's post about the new release.  It provides a VSS-style project difference tool that allows you not only to see what's changed but also reconcile changes.Tan Phan, a developer on the version control client team, has written a post describing how to customize the...