Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

How to work around the diff viewer problem in Team Explorer Beta 3

If you install only the Team Explorer (and not VSTS), there is a known issue (7.3) where the diff viewer won't work.  It also affects the built-in merge tool, but I think that's less painful for users who just need Team Explorer.The tool is diffmerge.exe, and it uses msdiff.dll. The msdiff.dll needs several missing several ...

How to upgrade from TFS Beta 3 to RTM

Allen Clark has posted the document on upgrading beta 3 to RTM so you'll know what to expect. Preparing to upgrade to RTM If you’re using Beta 3 Refresh, you may be wondering what you can do now to make the server upgrade to RTM as painless as possible. Here are a few things that will help. I’ve included the specification ...

Go to Changeset coming for RTM

You still won't be able to drag and drop in Source Control Explorer (some changes are just too large at this point), but you will be able to go to a changeset (without going through the back door using Get Specific Version solely for changeset look up).  In the next drop, the Edit -> Go to menu item will bring up the Find Changeset ...

Brian Harry on when to ship TFS

About half way through a thread on unlocking files locked by another user, Brian wrote a long response in the Team Foundation Forum about deciding what changes to make at this point and knowing when to ship.  It's a good read.  I expect that Brian will likely turn it into a blog post at some point...

Validating XML characters in SOAP messages

I've written about using the SoapHttpClientProtocol subclasses generated by wsdl.exe several times over the last year, including handling authentication, HTTP response codes, and setting timeouts properly.  Today I needed to change the code in TFS to better handle characters that are not allowed in XML. The ...

Work Item Tracking will use display names for RTM

In beta 3 (including refresh) and earlier, work items have always been assigned to user names.  For some organizations, that's a real problem, as the user names do not have any relationship to the user's real name.  We have fixed this for RTM.  Brian Harry sent the following email about it, and I thought it was worth sharing (...

Getting email when someone overrides a policy

James Manning today pointed out a post from Marcel de Vries showing how to register for email when someone checks in after overriding a policy failure.  While any policy failres and override comment are included in the standard check-in email, this allows you to get an email specifically when someone overrides a policy failure.&...

Beta 3 refresh released

Beta 3 of TFS has now been released and should be available on MSDN today (or very soon :-).  The differences between beta 3 and beta 3 refresh are small for most things.  Jeff Beehler wrote about some of the beta 3 refresh differences two weeks ago.  The most important reason for the beta 3 refresh is that it is built ...