Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
TFS 2008: Some properties that you can use to customize your build
Martin Woodward has posted a nice list of properties from Team Build that he has found useful. While some of the properties were also in TFS 2005, quite a few are new for TFS 2008 (aka Orcas). Some of the properties, such as RequestedFor, are properties of the current build that are set by the server, and thus you wouldn't set them yourself. There are two in particular that I would like to highlight: IncrementalGet and IncrementalBuild. Setting IncrementalGet to true in your tfsbuild.proj file (it's false by default for backwards compatibility) will result in each build of that build...
CodePlex project: TFSBuildLab
Peter Blomqvist and Mathias Olausson have undertaken an ambitious project to provide things like build queuing and continuous integration on top of TFS 2005. While we have these features in TFS 2008, this project provides some of these essential features for use with your current TFS deployment. TFSBuildLab - Project Description TFSBuildLab is a project to simplify the day to day operations when using automated builds and Team System. This project handles common Team System issues such as: - Continuous integration builds- Scheduled builds- Build queueing- Manual and automated build cleanup- TFS Event noti...
TFS 2008: Build agent configuration options
While some of the build agent properties are available in the VS GUI, buried in the tfsbuildservice.exe.config file are a number of options that control key aspects of the build agent and the build. This file existed in TFS 2005, but it had fewer options. While you don't have to change anything for the build agent to work in the normal case, there are options here that will help you get more out of the product. In future releases, these types of options will be exposed in better ways (e.g., GUI). Everything described below applies to TFS 2008 Beta 2 through TFS 2008 RTM. Many of these...
Survey: Which databases should Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals support?
Speaking of VSTS for DB Pros, Brian Keller is taking a survey. If you have an opinion on this, please share it! Survey: Which databases should Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals support? The team who builds Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals is collecting input on which 3rd-party (non-Microsoft) database providers they should be partnering with for future releases. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 are the two databases supported in the current release, but the team is investing in infrastructure which would allow partners to build support f...
Dave McKinstry on building database projects
Dave McKinstry has written a three-part series on building database projects. He includes information on building in TFS Build as well. Check it out!Technorati tags: tfs, team foundation, team build, vsts for database professionals
Why can’t I create a Team Project called name.com?
Recently this question came up on an internal mailing list. Dennis Habib, a developer on TFS, responded with the following. This is because '.com' is a restricted file type. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) has a list of extensions that it will not accept and will fail (there are quite a few), but there is no way to get this list from WSS programmatically from the client machine so we can't give you a warning (the list is configurable). You need to either remove that name from the restricted list in WSS Central Administration, or choose a different name.I didn't know that, so I thought I'd pass it along.&n...
How to build projects in Team Build that only Visual Studio can build
Aaron has written a great post on using Visual Studio (devenv) from within Team Build as part of the build process. If that sounds strange, it's necessary because there are projects that Visual Studio can build, but msbuild cannot. Projects in this category include Visual Studio setup projects (.vdproj), SQL Reporting Services (SRS), and BizTalk. Some projects may never be supported outside of msbuild, as is the case with the setup projects (WiX works msbuild, if you want a setup technology that doesn't rely on Visual Studio). We have documentation, such as this walkthrough on buildin...
Get: Date and time, read/write vs. read only
Periodically we get the following questions about get. The answer to each is no for both TFS 2005 (v1) and TFS 2008 (Orcas). It's something we considered doing in v1, but we ended up cutting it. It remains on the list of features to consider for the future. If you have opinions on this or other version control features, you'll want to let Mario know.Technorati tags: tfs, team foundation, version control
Goodbye to a 200-year old Osage-orange tree
This was a 200-year old Osage-orange tree on what used to be part of my grandfather's farm in Charlotte, NC. This former hay field is now a subdivision (the farm house is directly across the road in the grove of trees in the distance behind the scraper). The house I grew up in is adjacent to the farm (way over on the opposite side of the farm -- not pictured here). When I took this picture in August '03, construction was underway to turn the former field into a subdivision. Precautions were taken during construction to preserve the tree as a centerpiece for the new neighb...