Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Be a developer at Microsoft in Durham, NC
Do you want to be part of a team of talented developers and build great software? Here’s your chance to join the TFS team. In addition to development positions in Redmond (work item tracking client team), I have openings on our development team here in North Carolina. Please follow one of the links to apply online. Job Category: Software Engineering: Development Location: United States, NC, Durham Job ID: 753545 Product: Visual Studio Team System Division: Server & Tools Business Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) is leading the way in improv...
Making debugging easier: Source Indexing and Symbol Server
Have you ever tried to debug an issue in old binaries and you don’t remember which version of the source they correspond to? Have you debugged without symbols because no one saved them? Here’s how to make your life easier.One of the great features in Team Foundation Server 2010 Build is the ability to have your builds automatically indexed with source server and the symbols stored in symbol server. Ed Blankenship has posted a great write up on how to configure and use this feature from the build to debugging in Visual Studio. Source Server and Symbol Server Support in TFS 2010 A...
OData service for TFS
Brian Keller has release a new OData service for TFS. He does a great job explaining it, and he also includes a video demo. OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 What the heck is an OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010? I’m glad you asked. The purpose of this project is to help developers work with data from Team Foundation Server on multiple types of devices (such as smartphones and tablets) and operating systems. OData provides a great solution for this goal, since the existing Team Foundation Server 2010 object model only works for applications developed on the Windows p...
Professional Team Foundation Server 2010 is now out!
In the year since the release of TFS 2010, we’ve seen a run of great new books coming, all by authors who really know their subject matter extremely well. At the beginning of the year, Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew published Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, the book on MSBuild and TFS Build. Then Mickey Gousset, Brian Keller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, and Martin Woodward brought us Professional Application Lifecycle Management. My copy of that book came in handy when I wrote a post on using the code metrics power tool with TFS Build. It covers the full range of the VS...
How to reject checkins with code analysis violations
Andrew Hall wrote a great post on the Code Analysis Team Blog about how to use the code analysis checkin policy with gated checkin in Team Foundation 2010 Build to reject checkins that have code analysis warnings or errors. He shows you how to configure the rule set and set up the gated build definition to enforce the code analysis rules you’ve chosen. Preventing check-ins to TFS that contain code analysis warnings Recently we have received several questions regarding Visual Studio Code Analysis integration with Team Foundation Server’s check-in policy and build server, so I thought it woul...
We’re here, and we have a sign to prove it
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
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 network, it’s not likely to matter.Grant wrote a post on how to turn it on: TFS2010: How to enable compression for SOAP traffic.
How to distribute custom checkin policies and work item controls using the power tools
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 other systems, etc. However, there’s no mechanism in Team Explorer to download and install these.Youhana has written a post on how to use a feature in the power tools that not many folks know about. By creating a couple of version control folders in each t...
Moving work item description fields to HTML
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 Work Item Descriptions by Moving them to a HTML field In the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template (and most likely in future process templates), Microsoft is using HTML fields with rich formatting for the work item description fields. In VS Scrum 1.0… ...