Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
How to list the team projects created with a particular template in TFS 2008 or 2010
This question came up on an internal discussion, and I thought the answer would be useful to post. Question How we can find the list of projects created with the a particular VSTF template in TFS 2008 or 2010? In TFS 2005 we can find out programmatically as well with the query but in the new version we are not able to do so. Answer Sam Heald, a developer on the work item tracking server team, responded with the following answer. This information is no longer stored automatically in TFS 2008 and newer. In TFS 2005, a templateId was returned as an out parameter of the GetProjectProperties me...
Windows Live Writer 2008 is now available
The first version of Windows Live Writer is now available. I've been using the betas for a long time, and I think it's a great application (and it's free). I use it to write all of my blog posts. If it weren't for Live Writer, I wouldn't have written nearly so many blog posts. Windows Live Writer: Out of Beta Thank you to everyone who tried out the beta releases of Writer over the last year and gave us feedback. Over 1.5 million of you downloaded our last beta release, and your input helped make Writer the product it is today. Our goal from the start has been to help make blogging more po...
TSWA tip: Bulk edit
Sara Ford has a Visual Studio Tip of the Day series going. I thought I'd publish some tips on using Team System Web Access, and this is the first. I don't think I'll be able to do a tip per day. Calling it a "TSWA tip a few times a week" just doesn't sound that great. So I'll just leave it as TSWA Tips. In the regular Team Explorer (aka Team Foundation Client), you can't edit work items in bulk except by exporting them to Excel (at least as of Team Explorer 2008). However, you can do this using Team System Web Access. First, select the work items that you want to edit in bulk by clic...
TFS 2008 ships this month
Yesterday, Soma announced that VS 2008 and TFS 2008 ship this month. Prior to that, we had only said it would ship by the end of this year. It's going to be an exciting month. Not long after TFS 2008 ships, we're going to ship the final version of the Team System Web Access 2008 Power Tool, and it includes a few new features. I'll write more on those later. Microsoft Commits to November Release Date for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 Microsoft expands interoperability options for partners, delivers new innovations with Microsoft Sync Framework and Popfly Explorer releases. BARC...
TFSBuildLab 1.0 for TFS 2005
I last mentioned TFSBuildLab back in August when it reached beta 2. Peter Blomqvist and Mathias Olausson have now released 1.0. For those of you who aren't going to move to TFS 2008 in the near future (it ships by the end of this year), you'll want to look into this. I also posted a list of CI solutions for TFS 2005 about a year ago. TfsBuildLab v1.0 is out there !!! Finally we are feature complete as we intended it to be from the start (download it from here) we missed out intended deadline by almost 3 weeks :( (before 22/9) but for a sparetime project it still is decent... We have now been dog...
Using VSTS 2008 memory allocation profiling
I wanted to learn about the memory allocation profiling feature that is available VSTS 2008. While the profiler was also in VSTS 2005, the profiler will now also profile memory usage in addition to performance. A very good place to start is Ian Huff's blog. He's written a number of posts about the profiler. To use profiling on an application that's started outside of Visual Studio, you must run the vsperfclrenv.cmd batch script to set some environment variables and then run your application (it's not necessary if you have the profiling GUI in VS start the application for you). See Ian's ...
Extracting the Visual Studio 2005 Team System SP1 VPC image
[UPDATE 10/10/2007] MSDN has been updated with a new set of files with the naming issue corrected (see forum post). It may take a few days for it to propogate to all of the MSDN servers. ***** Reid, a customer, sent me email about a problem with using the Visual Studio 2005 Team System SP1 VPC image from the MSDN subscription site. I forwarded the email and found out that folks are looking into it. Until it gets fixed, here's the process to successfully extract the image. The files listed for download for the SP1 image are: en_visual_studio_2005_team...
Operations Guidance for TFS
Jeff Beehler has announced that we have now published guidance for operations. In addition to all of the great information in there, it provides a great summary of TFS links (see the bottom of the article in particular). Operations Guidance for TFS The Team System Rangers have done it again. Their mission is the accelerate adoption of Team System so they're always on the look out for those things that might be blocking customers from deploying and using our tools. Based on repeated customer requests, they've been focused recently on collecting the scattered documentation from various Microsoft...
Team System Web Access for TFS 2008 CTP released
[UPDATE] The final version is now available. Team System Web Access for TFS 2008 Power Tool CTP is now available! For TFS 2008, TSWA will continue to be a power tool through the TFS 2008 release. For the release after that, it will be a part of the regular product. The final release of the TSWA for TFS 2008 power tool will happen near the time TFS 2008 ships, which we've stated is by the end of this year. The big news with this release is the support for custom controls in work item forms. When you install TSWA, you will find a subdirectory in the installation directory that conta...