Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
How to measure performance using the web service performance dialog
You may have read about the Team Foundation activity log, which is a database table containing the web service requests executed by the server (turning it on, interesting queries, and more interesting queries). You may have also seen posts about turning on tracing, both server tracing (see Patrick Carnahan's first response) and client tracing (see my first response, or the commented-out block in tf.exe.config). Tracing produces tons of info, and it can be really useful for solving difficult issues. What if you just want a convenient way to see the web service calls your application...
Documentation error results in a build that never ends when building setup projects (.vdproj)
There's an error in the MSDN documentation on how to build Visual Studio setup projects with Team Build, which several customers have hit now (see this Team Build MSDN forum question). The result is that the build hangs; it never returns. The reason is that there's a line break in the MSBuild XML snippet on the MSDN documentation page that results in devenv (VS) being launched as an interactive process rather than with the set of arguments to build a deployment project. The result is a hang, since nothing can see the instance of VS that's been launched by the build service.The documentation...
How to determine whether tests passed and building a specific version
Aaron Hallberg has written a couple of posts about Team Build that started with questions from users. The first deals with how to determine, from code, whether tests passed. Determining Whether Tests Passed in Team Build In a forum post a while back, I laid out a method for determining whether tests had passed during a build. More recently, I have linked to this forum post in advising others on similar problems. Unfortunately, as a sharp user pointed out in this same thread, my solution doesn't actually work, since it relies on a property that is not accessible in Team Build v1! So - to remedy t...
VC API: CheckIn() may return 0
Back in March, I wrote a post called How to check in changes on behalf of other users. Among other things, you'll find the documentation comments for the Workspace.CheckIn() method, which you'll notice is now on MSDN. While that and How to validate check-in policies, evaluate check-in notes, and check for conflicts are probably the best documentation on how to use CheckIn(), I didn't mention that CheckIn(), which returns the changeset created by checking in, may return 0.The version control server automatically undoes the pending changes in the case where you attempt to check in files that haven'...
Sept. 6th Team System chat transcript is now available
Brian Keller mentioned that the transcript of the Sept. 6th chat is now available. Team System "Chat" transcript now available It looks like the the transcript from our September 6th "Chat" on MSDN is now available. It was great meeting everyone who could make it - we had nearly 150 people during the live session which is simply incredible! Team System has become very popular in a relatively short amount of time, which is of course thanks to our customers. So THANK YOU for believing in the product as much as we do! For people who couldn't attend the live chat session the transcript is a good w...
TFS API: How to choose between TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer() and the TeamFoundationServer constructor
Occasionally the question of whether to use the TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer() method or the TeamFoundationServer constructor comes up, and someone recently asked this question on an internal list. The answer depends on the needs of the application that you are writing. In this post, I'll discuss the main differences between the two. If you have an application where different parts of the code will need to access the same TeamFoundationServer object (say you need to hook up event handlers to the same VersionControlServer object that the rest of the code is using) but only have the name/U...
Building web projects with Team Build
Bernardo Heynemann wrote a nice pair of posts on using Team Build to build and deploy web projects. While he uses the recently-released continuous integration tool from Notion Solutions (Team CI), there are a number of continuous integration tools for Team Build. Team Build 101 (Part 1 of 2) Team Build 101 (Part 2 of 2) Today we engaged in a task (that seemed daunting at first, but proved to be just a little hard :)) that was the one to setup a team build for Continuous Integration of one of our websites. For you guys that didn´t know, MSBuild does not currently support Website deployment out of ...
Team Build API: GetBuildUri() and GetBuildDetails()
Aaron Hallberg plans to periodically post descriptions and examples of some of the more relevant Team Build web service methods. There's no good source for this information currently. Even the Team Build API documentation recently published on MSDN won't help you much, as I described here. If you have particular methods you'd like to know about sooner rather than later, be sure to leave a comment on his blog.His first post is about the GetBuildUri() and GetBuildDetails() methods on BuildStore. Team Build API: GetBuildUri and GetBuildDetails As Buck Hodges recently noted, some Team Build API...
Customizing the new TreeDiff power toy
If you haven't seen the new TreeDiff, you can see a screen shot in Brian Harry's post about the new release. It provides a VSS-style project difference tool that allows you not only to see what's changed but also reconcile changes.Tan Phan, a developer on the version control client team, has written a post describing how to customize the TreeDiff tool. He provides a link to Michal Malecki's post about a workaround for the get latest issue as well as how to fix the file extension filtering, change colors, and more.tags: tfs, team foundation, source control, tfpt