Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Stop piling on when the build breaks: Build checkin policy for Continuous Integration in Orcas
Last fall, Clark Sell wrote a blog post called Stop, the build is broken!! that introduced a checkin policy that reported errors when the build was broken. If you are using continuous integration where every checkin starts a build, you want folks to stop and fix build breaks when they occur, rather than pile on more checkins and perhaps make the problem worse (or at least harder to sort out). Since we've added support for continuous integration in Team Build for Orcas (screencasts, demo), we thought that it was a really great idea, and we've added a simple checkin policy in Orcas Team Build that d...
Orcas: Unit testing to be available in Visual Studio Professional
Naysawn Naderi wrote a post today stating that many of the unit test features in Team System will be included in Visual Studio Professional in Orcas. Here's the entire post, but I've highlighted part below that I think you'll want to read and perhaps provide feedback to the team as to your opinion. If folks want this, you may want to open an item on Connect and then post here (or somewhere else) so that other folks can vote on it. Before you get too excited, beta 1 isn't out, and it isn't standing at the door waiting to be released. I think that comment is just there so that whenever it does co...
Outlook 2007: Viewing all RSS feeds in a single folder like an RSS “inbox”
Since I've started using Outlook 2007 to manage my RSS feeds, I've wanted to have all of the posts show up in a folder, much like new mail shows in up the inbox. I don't like have to scroll through the list of folders and visit each one containing an unread post. It's just too tedious unless you have only a couple of feeds that you read. So, I finally set up an Outlook Search Folder to give me the folder view I've wanted. Here's what I did. Enjoy! Technorati tags: outlook 2007, rss, search folders
VSTS profiler: Installing only the command line tool
I'm posting this mostly to remind myself of where it is. This came across on the internal VSTS discussion alias today. Visual Studio Profiler has a standalone installation: look for vs_profiler.exe in the Visual Studio installation CD/DVD. Installing that package allows users to collect, analyze and report performance data from command line. The package does not include any GUI. It is light-weight installation, suitable for production or testing environments. See the following article for more details on how to profile applications from command line: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/aa718...
How to get a complimentary copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition
According to the following Microsoft web page, you can get a complimentary VS 2005 Standard Edition by attending "labcasts." You'll have to go to the web page and read the rules, etc. I thought I'd pass this along, since I stumbled across it tonight. The Mouse is Mightier than the Sword Defy All Challenges With Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 -- Microsoft Labcasts Show You How A Hands-On Experience Interested in leveraging your existing development skills to become more versatile and productive? Attend our new Visual Basic 2005 Labcast Series. Experience for yourself how to turn Microsoft Visual Basic 2...
VSTS future releases: Orcas, Rosario, and Power Tools
A new high-level roadmap for Orcas, Rosario, and Power Tools is now available. The Visual Studio Team System Future Releases web page covers these topics at varying levels of detail, with the greatest amount detail being supplied for Orcas, of course. The Orcas TFS information is basically the same as what we've published before. Here's what it says about Rosario. Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" The next major release of Visual Studio Team System is code-named “Rosario” and will be released following the “Orcas” release. In this exciting release, we will be del...
Web interface now available for TFS: Microsoft acquires TeamPlain
We have never had a web interface for Team Foundation Server work item tracking, much to the astonishment of our customers. Well, there's a fix for that now. And you can download it today (see below for details). Brian Harry wrote a post this morning about the acquisition of TeamPlain. Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain! Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser. The f...
Vista sidebar build monitor and PowerShell scripts for Team Build Orcas
Jason Prickett, a developer on Team Build, has written some very nice posts. All of these posts only work with Team Build Orcas. The first one shows a very cool Vista sidebar which Jason has fiddled with a while back as a side project and finally got around to finishing it off and making it available. His post has a screenshot as well. Monitoring Build Status in your Windows Vista Sidebar So, I have been wanting to create a sidebar gadget for a while, but I also wanted it to be something useful. In this post I have attached the source code for a sidebar gadget that monitors the build status of...
Aaron’s back and has new posts on Team Build
Aaron Hallberg took a month off after the birth of his daughter, Stella. Now that he's back, he's got a couple of interesting posts. The first one applies to TFS 2005 (aka v1) and shows you how to pass custom properties to each solution that you build. It's something that a lot of folks have needed to be able to do, but the solution with v1 is not good. If you choose to do this, you will have to fix your build when you upgrade to Orcas (notice that I didn't say if you upgrade to Orcas ;-)). In Orcas, we've made this really easy to do, so all of this only applies to TFS 2005 (v1). Passin...