Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
TSWA tip: Copy a bug to quickly file a new bug in an area related to the original
Like Team Explorer, Team System Web Access does not support work item templates yet (though you can get a power tool work item template add-in for Team Explorer 2005 -- look for power tools for TFS 2008 in December). However, you can use the "Create Copy of Work Item" feature to copy a work item that's similar to the one you want to file. Then you only need to change the information that's different for the new bug and save it. To do this, click the triangle beside the work item you want to copy and choose "Create Copy of Work Item" from the popup menu. This particular feature is not available f...
Using CruiseControl.NET to trigger CI builds in TFS 2005
James Dawson previously posted a plugin for CruiseControl.NET that provided a continuous integration facility for TFS 2005, which I mentioned back in August. He's now set up a CodePlex project for it: TFS TeamBuild Task for CruiseControl.NET. You can get both the binaries and the source code from the CodePlex project.Continuous integration is now built into Team Build 2008. However, for those who have to continue using TFS 2005 for a while, projects like this provide a way to fill the gaps.Technorati Tags: team foundation server, tfs 2005, team build, cruisecontrol.net, continuous integration
Martin Woodward’s presentation on what’s new in TFS 2008
Martin Woodward has a posted a great set of slides from a presentation he did on what's new in TFS 2008. After going through all of the features other than build, he spends more than half of the slides on the build features of TFS 2008 (aka Team Build). I highly recommend taking a look at the slides, particularly if you haven't paid close attention to TFS 2008 up to this point. Team Foundation Server 2008 - What's New Talk Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to my local .NET User Group (NIMTUG) on what is new in Team Foundation Server 2008. Interestingly, most of the audience where new...
How to uninstall VS 2008 Beta 2 before installing the final version of VS 2008
There have been a few questions about how to correctly uninstall all of VS 2008 Beta 2 in order to install the final version of VS 2008. Scott Guthrie posted the steps for doing this earlier today. A subset of this list would apply if you have installed Team Foundation Team Explorer 2008 Beta 2, rather than the full VS 2008 with Team Explorer. At the end he recommends rebooting after removing everything and before installing VS 2008. From my experience, that's good advice. The only thing additionally I've typically done after uninstalling a non-RTM build is to delete the VS 9.0 registry h...
How would you prioritize features for MSBuild?
Dan Moseley, a developer on the MSBuild team, wants to know how you would prioritize features for the next version of MSBuild by asking, How would you spend $100 on MSBuild? The release of Visual Studio 2008 is imminent, which means the product teams are beginning to work on the future, and he posts about some of the features that they are considering. How would you spend $100 on MSBuild? We're currently planning for our next version (aka, "Dev10" - no code name this time) and subsequent releases. In that spirit, I'd like to do a quick poll of MSBuild aficionados to help us keep our "vision" for MSBuild a...
TSWA tip: Send an email with a work item or query results
Let's say you're going through your bugs and want to ask someone a question about one of them. You can use Team System Web Access to send that person an email containing all of the work item's information and a link to it. To email a work item, open the work item in TSWA. Go to the Tools menu shown below and choose Send as Email. You'll get a new window where you can enter the person's full email address and type a message. The message body contains a link to the work item in Team System Web Access and all of the work item's fields and contents. You can also email query results. ...
TSWA tip: Search bugs and reports
[Update 10/6/2008] In addition to the default search behavior described below, TSWA 2008 SP1 adds Outlook-style search capability, which is described here. Have you ever wanted a quick way to find the bugs containing some word? Team System Web Access comes to your rescue. In the upper left corner underneath the team project selector, there is a search box. Type in a word and hit Enter. If you want to search for a phrase rather than a single word, simply enclose it in quotation marks (e.g., "team build" or "team foundation server"). Without the quotation marks, you'll be searching for...
Turning off Just-in-Time Debugging on your servers
I saw Mac Noland's post tonight about turning off the just-in-time debugging popup window on his TFS server. We've had this problem internally. If you have a debugger installed on your computer, such as Visual Studio or WinDbg, the installation will enable just-in-time debugging such that when something crashes you'll get a window asking you whether you want to debug the problem. That's a great feature, except when there's no one around to dismiss the dialog. If you have a build computer, for example, and someone's custom msbuild task crashes in the middle of the night, you'll probably just wan...
SharePoint lists in Outlook 2007 are awesome
If you use Outlook 2007 and SharePoint, you really need to read this. I've been using this feature for the last couple of weeks. It syncs the documents into Outlook so they are available offline, you can search them, and you can edit and upload when you get back online. It's really slick. Read the post. SharePoint and Outlook – The Perfect Link Outlook 2003 introduced integration with SharePoint, allowing you to see some SharePoint information (like calendars) in Outlook alongside your personal information. In Outlook 2007, we made this a whole lot better. Here we’ll focus...