Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Five things about me
Martin Woodward tagged me with that blogging game that's going around where you post five things that people don't generally know about you and then tag five more people. Okay, I have to admit it seems kind of fun, so I'll do my part to keep it going. I'm tagging Jeff Beehler, Aaron Hallberg, Mario Rodriguez, Jeff Atwood, and Clark Sell.
TFS Version Control Server Team blog is alive
Chandru, a developer on the TFS version control server, has written the first post on the Version Control Server Team blog. I helped Craig Harry, development lead for TFS version control platform, set this blog up a while back, so I'm excited to see the first post. Craig's team owns both the version control server and the client object model, which moved to his team in the re-org that occurred last spring. Orcas Workspace Mapping Improvements I thought I would give you an overview of the workspace mapping improvements which Brian Harry mentioned in his TFS roadmap post. P...
Orcas Team Build Continuous Integration spec is now available
Back in early December, I wrote the post, More on the Orcas features for Team Build, that described many of the new features that we are adding for Orcas, elaborating on what Brian Harry had written in his TFS Roadmap post. I'm very happy to say that later in December, we finished the implementation of those features, and they'll be in the next CTP.A few days ago, we published the specification for Continuous Integration and the other features that we have added to Team Build. It's available in Team Foundation Server section of the Feature Specifications for Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" pa...
How to deal with the Y2K7 problem — file versions and AssemblyInfoTask
If you use the AssemblyInfoTask to stamp the version numbers for your assemblies that you build with MSBuild as part of your Team Build process, you may run into the "Y2K7" problem. The version number is stored as a 16-bit (yes, 16 not 32) unsigned integer. With the format YMMDD, January 1, 2007 becomes 70101, which is 70,101 and doesn't fit in a 16-bit integer. Internally, the version numbering has been reset to have a smaller number for the year. For the last part of 2006, builds were 1MMDD. Starting with 1/1/07, they are 2MMDD. Neil Enns discusses the issue in the MSBuild Te...
Beeps from bullets
Way back near the beginning of development of TFS version control, which was called Hatteras back then, we sent email to the team manually when we checked in. So I would typically write my checkin comment in Outlook, which was using Microsoft Word as the editor, and then paste it into the checkin dialog. My comment was a bulleted list of the changes that I made. I would start with an asterisk, and Word would convert it to a bullet. Later, viewing the changeset details on the command line would produce beeps. I knew that the Unicode bullet character was being converted to a BEL (...
IE Add-in for filing bugs in TFS for web pages
Rob Caron wrote about the post Automatically raise bugs from IE on the Microsoft Developer Tools UK Sales Team blog. Here's the text of the post, and there's a screen shot on the GotDotNet page. Have you ever been in a position where someone raises a bug on a web page that you have been working on, but doesn't supply enough information to allow you to reproduce the problem? Ok, I didn't think it was just me :-) To try and help this, I've written an addin for IE to allow users to easily raise a complete bug report. When the user indicates that there is a problem on the page, the addin will create a new ...
Brian Harry’s explanation of Rosario
Brian's post What's in a Code Name? provides some explanation behind the Orcas and Rosario code names. You won't hear the word "Rosario" normally, and here's a bit on why. What's in a Code Name? Mary Jo Foley is writing about one Microsoft code name per day on her blog. I think it's pretty cool and there's a few code names I've never even heard of before. She has written about a couple of Developer Division code names so I thought I'd add my own colorful commentary. ... So we get to Rosario. Rosario is a resort on Orcas island. It is a code name that the VSTS team has been ...
How to add your own message in the build report
If you've ever wanted to add your own message in the "Build Steps" section of the detailed build report, Aaron Hallberg provides a custom task to do it.Aaron, along with the rest of the team, had been focused on finishing up the continuous integration feature for Team Build. I'm happy to say that we got it finished and checked into the main-line code this week. It'll be in the next CTP that's released. It's also in a Channel 9 interview that Brian Keller taped yesterday where Jim Lamb and I talk about Team Build as well as demonstrate the new features. Brian recorded interviews with a...
Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 released
Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 was released yesterday. Here are the direct download links. · VSTS SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&displaylang=en · TFS SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=A9AB638C-04D2-4AEE-8AE8-9F00DD454AB8&displaylang=en · Quiescing GDR (required for the TFS patch): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c18c756e-8f80-4987-b3bf-600068a9e3c4&DisplayLang=enHeath Stewart has a blog post on how to slipstream Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. tags: ...