Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
VS 2010 SP1 crashes when viewing build on a TFS 2008 server
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 patch if you hit the problem.The fix is available at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=34824. KB2522890 - VS10 SP1 crashes on build details from TFS 2008 build explorer Issue DescriptionVisual Studio 2010 SP1 crashes or shows ...
Managing TFS 2010: How to clean up test attachment data
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 Attachment Cleaner for Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 & Test Professional 2010 to delete old test data to reduce the size. Here’s the description from that page. Overview: In Visual Studio 2010, with the introduction of Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 &am...
Visual Studio setup projects (vdproj) will not ship with future versions of VS
[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 confusion over the future of WiX since at one point there was a plan to ship it but then that changed. Rob Mensching, who leads the WiX project, is a developer on Visual Studio, and Visual Studio continues to contribute to the WiX project. We use WiX to create the ...
Hidden gem in TFS 2010: How to rollback a changeset with tf rollback
[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 tracking and load testing?). Nearly everyone in the audience was using TFS, and many folks had already moved to TFS 2010. We covered a lot of ground, touching on parts of VS and ALM – more than just TFS. I got to thinking as folks were asking questions ...
TFS 2010 SP1: Unknown error (0x80005000) (type COMException) – Make sure IIS 6 compat mode is turned on
[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 it fails. At first, we looked at the KB log file, which is an HTML file named something like KB2182621_20110314_153652021.htm (after the KB number, it’s the date and time – one log will be generated per failed attempt). That file doesn’t contain the error unfortunatel...
The book to buy on team build: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build, Second Edition
If you are responsible for work with your team’s build system, you will definitely want to buy a copy of Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (Second Edition). Both of the authors now work for Microsoft. William Bartholomew is part of the central engineering team and has been building the infrastructure to allow Team Foundation Build to be used as the build system for all of the developer division. You can follow that progress and find more info on team build on his blog. Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi works on the web platform team, and he writes a lot about b...
Web projects and team build
Vishal Joshi, lead program manager for web platform tools, has a great blog covering using various project types with Team Foundation Build. Here’s a selection of his posts on using team build, which I highly recommend if you are working with web projects. Technorati Tags: team foundation,build,web projects,team build
Improvements to baseless merge in TFS 2010 SP1
Starting with TFS 2010 SP1, there are two improvements to how baseless merges work: base file version and handling deleted files. First is that if you specify a starting range for a baseless merge, we will now use that changeset as the base in the three-way content merge. That results in a vastly improved experience in merging file content for a baseless merge. For example, tf merge /baseless /v:1234~1234 $/ProjX/foo $/AcmeV2/foo or tf merge /v:1234~T $/ProjX/foo $/AcmeV2/foo. The second is the handling of deletions. Before the change, items that are deleted in the source branch were not included in the baseles...
Can you downgrade from SQL Enterprise to SQL Standard?
Question: Can a TFS 2010 Team Project Collection (TPC) on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise be down converted to SQL Server Standard 2008 edition? Answer: This is covered in the 2010 Upgrade guide post. The script is: exec prc_EnablePrefixCompression @online = 0, @disable = 1 (answer provided by Ed Holloway)