March 2011 | Buck Hodges

We’re here, and we have a sign to prove it

Buck HodgesMarch 30, 2011Mar 30, 201103/30/11

Yeah, seven years in this location, and the building had no outward markings to indicate that our office is here. It’s official. We’re here. Really...

How to turn on compression for TFS 2010 web services

Buck HodgesMarch 30, 2011Mar 30, 201103/30/11

In the past, we’ve turned on compression for the SOAP responses for the TFS web services. In TFS 2010, you must do it manually. In the future, I hope we have it turned on by default. It’s particularly good for teams that aren’t at the same location as the TFS server. For users on a high-speed corporate...

How to distribute custom checkin policies and work item controls using the power tools

Buck HodgesMarch 28, 2011Mar 28, 201103/28/11

Custom checkin policies and custom work item controls are great ways to take advantage of the extensibility of TFS. You can use checkin policies to enforce certain standards on checkins (even in your builds). Custom work item controls allow you to add controls to your work item forms that present data in particular way, access...

Moving work item description fields to HTML

Buck HodgesMarch 23, 2011Mar 23, 201103/23/11

Neno’s been blogging a lot this month, and many of his posts have helpful tools associated with them. The post below caught my eye as particularly useful. We’ll be using HTML fields more going forward, and he has a tool to help you move your existing work items to use an HTML field for the Description. Enriching your ...

VS 2010 SP1 crashes when viewing build on a TFS 2008 server

Buck HodgesMarch 23, 2011Mar 23, 201103/23/11

Unfortunately, we introduced a regression into Visual Studio 2010 SP1 in the process of fixing a performance issue in the build details view that a number of customers had reported (viewing the log was really slow for larger builds). We made this change late in SP1. I apologize for the inconvenience. I want to make sure you know about that ...

Managing TFS 2010: How to clean up test attachment data

Buck HodgesMarch 18, 2011Mar 18, 201103/18/11

Test attachment data generated by the new testing features in VS 2010 can add a large amount of data to your TFS server. In fact, we discovered on our own “dogfood” server that test data was taking up more space than the version control data. You can read more about it in Grant’s post here.You can use the Test ...

Visual Studio setup projects (vdproj) will not ship with future versions of VS

Buck HodgesMarch 17, 2011Mar 17, 201103/17/11

[UPDATE 04/18/14] The Visual Studio team has released an extension to VS 2013 to address the feedback on this, which has been loud and clear for a long time now: Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension. [UPDATE 11/6/12] Fixed broken links. At the user group meeting last night, someone asked about the future of WiX. There was some ...

Hidden gem in TFS 2010: How to rollback a changeset with tf rollback

Buck HodgesMarch 16, 2011Mar 16, 201103/16/11

[UPDATE 8/8/11] The TFS 2010 power tools now provide rollback in the UI as described here. Tonight Justin and I spoke to the Minnesota Visual Studio User Group. It was completely unscripted, and we had a great time answering questions and telling a few stories (can you name the original code names for version control, work item ...

TFS 2010 SP1: Unknown error (0x80005000) (type COMException) – Make sure IIS 6 compat mode is turned on

Buck HodgesMarch 15, 2011Mar 15, 201103/15/11

[Update 3/16/11] There is a KB article with TFS 2010 SP1 installation troubleshooting should you hit problems: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2516423. Problem A customer ran into this issue, and I want to post it to help anyone else who hits it. The symptom is that you install Service Pack 1 for Team Foundation Server 2010, and ...

Buck Hodges