Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Extending the Windows Vista grace period to 120 days
Jeff Atwood has written a post on how to extend the Vista grace period to 120 days. It turns out that you can extend it three times for 30 days each, giving you up to 120 days when you count the original 30-day grace period. It seems like a great way to try out Vista Ultimate to see if it's worth the extra money. Extending The Windows Vista Grace Period to 120 Days If you're on the fence about the impending release of Windows Vista, I recommend trying before you buy. Every Vista DVD includes the ability to install any edition of Vista without a product key. When you install without a product key, you...
“Way behind the combination of Nant/CruiseControl.Net”
I was reading through some customer feedback about VSTS and TFS. There were a lot of positive comments in there. I was looking for the negatives, though, because I want to know where we're missing the mark (perhaps by miles). This is one that really resonated with me. "The Build Machine aspect of Team Foundation Server is way behind the combination of Nant/CruiseControl.Net"It's my sincere hope that what we are doing with Team Foundation Build in Orcas will dramatically change that perception. The following posts cover many of our new features. As a result, I'm looking forward to what fol...
Using FinalBuilder with Team Foundation Build
Via Richard Hundhausen, I learned that the folks at FinalBuilder posted an article on their web site about how to get FinalBuilder working with Team Build via FinalBuilder's custom MSBuild task. If you use FinalBuilder, you may want to check that out.tags: tfs, team foundation server, team build, msbuild, final builder
Tabbed windows for remote desktop connections
Shortly after I wrote about Remote Desktop Connection 6.0 client, Blake Handler sent me email about a CodePlex project called Terminals. Terminals is a neat application that hosts RDC sessions in tabs.One of the options in the Terminals connection dialog is whether to connect to the console, which becomes important when connecting to Windows 2003 Servers. Unless I missed it, the RDC 6.0 GUI still doesn't have this feature, and you still have to use mstsc /console.Terminals was created by Dudu Shmaya and Eyal Post. If Dudu's name sounds familiar, it's because he also wrote the TFSBuildManager tha...
Remote Desktop Connection 6.0 client
Last month, the Remote Desktop Connection 6.0 client was released. It has some nice new features in it, which I've listed below. Being able to log into a machine on a private network without having to use a VPN sounds really cool (TS Gateway servers), but I haven't been able to try that out. I found an internal page where folks could sign up for access, but unfortunately the list was full. Being able to span multiple monitors (mstsc /span) is really nice too.The change that I like the most right now, though, is a really simple one. It now uses the same credentials dialog that you see...
Internal TFS server database maintenance
Brian posted these answers in a comment to a question on his January dogfood statistics post. These may be of interest to folks out there, particularly those running larger-sized Team Foundation Server installations. 1) What is the current size of our dogfood database? 2) Backups/Restores - With large databases, are there any issues with backups and/or restores? How often do we run backups? How long do they take typically? Full Databases backups (using LiteSpeed) – Every night Transactional Logs backups (using LiteSpeed) – Every 15 minutes For our biggest instance (De...
Incremental gets with Team Build and the list of files that changed
After you learn five things about Aaron that you didn't know, he'll show you how to do an incremental get without necessarily doing an incremental build. Doing an Incremental Get in Team Build In Team Build v1.0, it is not possible, without some trickeration, to do an incremental get without also doing an incremental build. (The process for doing both is documented here, and consists of setting the SkipClean property to true, the SkipInitializeWorkspace property to true, and the ForceGet property to false) The short answer for why this is the case is that the CoreClean target wipes out the entire sou...
TFSBuildManager – project on CodePlex
Lorenzo Barbieri wrote about a tool on CodePlex called TFSBuildManager. I didn't know about this one. It's a tool written by Dudu Shmaya. The CodePlex project page has the following about the project. TFSBuildManager TFSBuildManager is a utility to manage Team Foundation build types in an environment other than Visual Studio. Main Features News Information Looking at the screenshots, it looks quite useful. There is a download from the releases page.Dudu's blog has quite a few posts about using the Team Build web service. Here are links to some of them. tags: tfs, team fou...
John Robbins’ approach to working offline with Team Foundation Server
John Robbins has written a post called Working Offline with TFS. In it, he describes his approach to using Visual Studio when not connected to the Team Foundation Server. As many of you know, the server information is stored in the .sln file, and VS tries to connect to the server whenever you open a solution that contains the server information in its source control bindings. To make things go more quickly, he wrote a couple of custom MSBuild tasks to automate the process of adding and removing the bindings the solution files. While you don't have to remove the bindings while you're offlin...