Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Guidance on using branches in TFS version control
Jeff Beehler announced the initial release of guidance on using branching and merging with your development process with TFS. This has been a pretty popular request from folks. Branching guidance now available I'm extremely excited to announce the availability of Branching guidance for Team Foundation Server. This was a collaborative effort between the TFS product team and members of our "Ranger" program who are focused on accelerating adoption of V1. While the product documentation will tell you how each of our tools works, it doesn't provide insight into the best practice usage of each. ...
TFS shipped one year ago today!
As Jeff Beehler points out, we shipped TFS one year ago today. In the intervening time, we reorganized and completed the TFS development work on Orcas (minus a few design change requests (DCRs)), which you can try out in the March Orcas CTP (since it's based on TFS code from January, not everything is in there, such as build scheduling). If you want to see a demo of the Orcas Team Build features, check out this Channel 9 interview with Jim Lamb and me.tags: tfs, team foundation, orcas
Orcas Team Build: WCF web services replace .NET remoting
In Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2005 (v1), the communication from the application tier (AT) to the build computer used .NET remoting. This was the only component in Team Foundation Server that used .NET remoting, as all other communication used web services (see Team Foundation Server Security Architecture). As part of the .NET 3.0 framework that shipped in the Vista timeframe (the Orcas framework is .NET 3.5 while VS 2005 shipped .NET 2.0, if you are trying to keep the version numbers straight), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) introduced the ability to create web services that run with...
New add-in: Viewing other users’ pending changes from within Visual Studio
Fairly often, someone asks for the ability to see the pending changes in the system from within Visual Studio. Running "tf status /user:* $/ /r" (or whatever you want) just isn't appealing to everyone. Ognjen Bajic posted about Ekobit's new free VS add-in that will allow you to view the pending changes in the system from within Visual Studio. List Pending Changes Browser for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers(List Pending Changes Browser is a free software ( licence agreement )) If you have ever needed to find out who has checked out files from your project on the...
Channel 9 interview and demo of Orcas Team Build
The interview, which contains a demo, has finally been posted (you may remember it being mentioned in December). I'd like to say thanks to Brian Keller for doing this! Continuous Integration with Team Build “Orcas” Jim Lamb and Buck Hodges on the Team Foundation Server team show off the new Continuous Integration support they are building for the "Orcas" release of Team Foundation Server! ‘nuff said. Check out the demo! see the video... This demo was done with a build near the end of the feature crew for CI, and I'm happy to say that it went really well (a demo is usually a good test!)....
Accessing Team Foundation version control from Ant and Java-based CruiseControl
Martin Woodward of Team[rise announced the Ant and Java-based CruiseControl support for Team Foundation version control in his post on the release of Teamprise 2.1. There's lots of good stuff in there, but this stuck out at me in particular. If you are using TFS and Java, this is a great addition. They've even made the Ant and CruiseControl support available for anyone, not just Teamprise customers! Teamprise 2.1 Released Yesterday we made version 2.1 of Teamprise publicly available. If you've previously installed Teamprise, then I recommend that you upgrade to...
Configuring the build to use the version control proxy
If you have a version control proxy at a remote site and you wish to have Team Build use the version control proxy, you'll need to modify the registry of the account that's running the build service on the build computer. Here's what you'll need to put into the registry. You'll need to change "someproxy" to your proxy's name. Also, if you need to do this with Orcas, you'll need to change 8.0 to 9.0 for this to have the desired effect. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Proxy] "Enabled"="True" "U...
I’m in Redmond
I don't travel much. It's been almost exactly a year since I was in Redmond. In March 2006, Ed Hintz and I gave a presentation on version control.This time Jim Lamb and I are here to learn about some of the internal build systems as part of our planning for the future. Well, Jim's here to party with the PMs as well. I just get to go to meetings. :-(
TFS Workspaces: 2005 and Orcas
Martin Woodward has done a great job explaining workspaces and working folder mappings in a pair of recent posts. For those who are new to TFS or haven't taken the time to think about the concepts and uses, it's a good idea to read them. While his posts apply to both Team Foundation Server 2005 and Orcas, version control adds two new advanced capabilities to working folder mappings in Orcas. I call them advanced because many users won't have any need for them, as with Martin's comment about not having a need for cloaks at TeamPrise. However, if you need these features, they are really ...