Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
MSBuild Sidekick V2 beta
Eugene Zakhareyev has released a beta of the second version of MSBuild Sidekick. This version adds some unique features, including visualizing the build targets. If you've ever had to pick up someone else's msbuild project files, you'll really appreciate this feature. Here's a screenshot of the target visualization from Visualization in MSBuild Sidekick v2. You can find out more about MSBuild Sidekick v2 in MSBuild Sidekick v2 beta is available! Be sure to check out the Team Foundation Sidekick as well.Technorati tags: msbuild, team build
How offline mode works in TFS 2008 version control
Ben Ryan, a developer on the version control team, has written a couple of posts about the offline feature introduced in Team Foundation Server 2008 Version Control. The first one in particular answers some questions that have come up. When and how does my solution go "offline"? TFS 2008 adds improved support for "offline" scenarios. This blog post identifies the scenarios under which a solution will be placed in "offline" mode. more... How to make TFS Offline strictly solution-based For some users it may be a bit offputting that taking one solution offline causes all other solutions ...
WiX to be included in the Visual Studio “Rosario” release
Rob Mensching has written a post about the WiX toolset being included with the Rosario release of Visual Studio Team System. WiX is part of the toolset used to create the installation packages for Visual Studio, as well as being one of the first open source projects ever at Microsoft. Whereas Visual Studio setup projects (.vdproj) can only be built using devenv and thus require Visual Studio to be installed on the build computer, the WiX toolset supports msbuild via custom tasks.In the post, Rob goes over a series of questions and answers regarding WiX and Visual Studio to explain what's being include...
Building Ant projects with Team Foundation Build
Martin Woodward has written a post on using Ant within Team Build 2008 and 2005. He includes an initial release of the binaries and documentation. This is great for the folks using Java with TFS! Building Ant projects from Team Build With the recent release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server we are seeing more and more people looking to use the build capabilities of TFS (often referred to as "Team Build") to manage their Java based builds as well as their .NET ones. We have an MSBuild task available internally that we use to trigger Ant based builds and report the progres...
Web Deployment Projects (WDP) for Visual Studio 2008 CTP
[UPDATE 2/3/08] The final version is now available. I know a lot of folks have used web deployment projects (WDP) with Team Build. The WDP release for VS 2005 does not work with 2008. The web developer team has just released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of WDP for VS 2008. Being a CTP, it's not fully tested. However, they are looking for feedback before releasing the final version in January of 2008. Web Deployment Projects (WDP) for Visual Studio 2008 - December 2007 CTP Released Based on the feedback from web development community we just released the Customer Techno...
Video on the new features in Team Foundation Build 2008
There's a great new video on the MSDN web site by Richard Hundhausen that goes over the new features in Team Foundation Build 2008. It's one of the featured videos this week. The video covers the major new features and provides a great introduction to the product. How Do I: Learn the New Features and Capabilities of Team Foundation Build 2008? In this video, Richard Hundhausen explores the new features and capabilities of Team Foundation Build 2008, including defining and managing build definitions, agents, qualities, and retention policies. Presented by Richard Hundhausen on November 20, 2007Leng...
Team System Web Access 2008 Power Tool is now available
Today we have released the final version of the Team System Web Access (TSWA) 2008 power tool! Team System Web Access provides a web interface to Team Foundation Server 2008. Here's a list of feature changes. Of course, we also fixed a number of bugs. For those of you who remember the need for the TSWA users group in the installation of the TSWA 2005 power tool, you'll be happy to know that is gone. That was something we had to add to satisfy security requirements, but we've since changed the code to handle the impersonation better such that impersonated user identities no longer need ac...
Building VS 2008 projects with TFS 2005
The question has come up a couple of times as to how to get a TFS 2005 build agent (the build agent is the service running on the computer) to build a Visual Studio 2008 solution. When you try to do it, you get the following error. Solution file error MSB5014: File format version is not recognized. MSBuild can only read solution files between versions 7.0 and 9.0, inclusive. The TFS 2005 build agent finds msbuild.exe by asking the common language runtime (CLR) for its installing directory. In VS 2008, the .NET framework version is 3.5, but the CLR remains at 2.0. The result is that the ...
Visual Studio Team System chat – December 5, 2007
Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. Hopefully, there will be a fair amount of discussion around the newly release 2008 version. I'm planning to be in the first chat. There will be two chat sessions. Note that I have posted the times in the Eastern US time zone. Technorati Tags: vsts, visual studio team system, tfs, team foundation server