Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
All about the caching proxy for version control
Rob Caron posted the following the other day, and I've copied it below. If you want to learn more about how we cache versions of files to speed up downloads, including get, view, diff, and more, you'll want to take a look at this. Team Foundation Server Proxy Screencasts We just posted a series of six screencasts by Swamy Subramanian, a developer on Team System, that go into great detail about the inner workings and configuration of Team Foundation Server Proxy. TeamFoundationServerProxyScreencasts.zip
Configuring different diff/merge tools for Team Foundation Version Control
Many of you probably know that you can specify your own diff/merge tool. One thing that's not mentioned on that documentation page is that you can specify * for the Extension field to change the default diff or merge tool.James Manning recently put together a nice post on configuring different diff and merge tools, making it easier to properly configure the tool of your choice. This is most useful for merge, where for v1 a number of other available tools offer a better experience than diffmerge.exe in the more complex cases. Diff/Merge configuration in Team Foundation - Common command and argumen...
How to change the computer name and update the owner name for a workspace
As part of the information about a workspace, the version control server records the name of the computer that hosts a workspace and the user that owns the workspace. If you need to change your computer name or your user name, how do you tell the server to update the workspace information?The command line, tf.exe, provides two options, /updateComputerName and /updateUserName, on the workspaces command to address this issue. Note that in version 1 you must use the command line for this. Also, you may notice that the documentation on MSDN shows that these options do not accept values, but tha...
How to create shadow folders in TFS
One of the features from VSS that TFS does not support "out of the box" is shadow folders. Last year, one of our interns, Philip, wrote short guide to setting up shadow folder for TFS by using Scheduled Tasks in Windows (he also wrote tfpt.exe). I've attached the MS Word document to this post. You can read the introduction below. Another use for this is to prime the version control caching proxy at a remote location to minimize the amount of time users have to wait to get files from the version control repository. Shadow Folders with Team Foundation Version Control Microsoft Team Foundation Ver...
Working around not being able to delete a work item type
The following question came up in the forum: "How do I delete the custom work item type that I created?" Tony Edwards posted the following. One other thing that comes to my mind is to have a second server to use for experimentation before applying changes to the production server. It is not possible in v1 [to delete work item types]. This question came up recently and Bill Essary gave the following guidance for mitigating the problem: Here are a few things that you can do: 1) Change the name of the type to something like “(Deprecated) Bug” so that users ...
Listing the process templates on a TFS server
In response to a forum question about how to list the process templates on the server, Tony Edwards, a developer on Work Item Tracking, posted the following code snippet showing how to do it. The TeamFoundationServer object provides a number of services, including one for dealing with process templates. Here is a simple console program to list the templates. IProcessTemplate has members that return XML - you could bind that to the grid. You would invoke the sample below as follows: templateheaders http://<your_server>:8080 using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using Syst...
Want to influence the next version of TFS? Now is the time!
Brian Harry has a new post requesting your input for the next version of TFS. The team has just started planning for TFS, so now is the best time to let him know what you would like to have in the next version. Team Foundation Server and the Future With V1 now mostly behind us we're starting to look ahead to what comes next. We're collecting the lists of everything we wished we had been able to V1 and all of the suggestions that we've gotten from customers - forums, email, MSDN Product Feedback Center, etc. We're also taking a high level look at what the core value proposition(s) for&n...
Determining the amount of space required to store files and work items
Recently someone asked how to estimate the space required for the databases on a Team Foundation Server. To do that, we can take a look at our own dogfood server to see where the space goes. With that information and some knowledge of how the system works, we can come up with a useful way to estimate the approximate space required by the TFS databases. Version Control If we start with the version control database, we currently have 1.7 M files and folders, so that works out to about 77 KB per item (size of the version control database divided by the number of items). That’s avera...
Robert Horvick’s blog posts on branch and merge history
Robert Horvick, now a dev on the version control team, has been writing a series of posts on using the branch and merge API methods. If you want to explore that area, I recommend checking out his posts.Following merge history using the TFS command line is the introductory look at what he's trying to do. Then he walks through creating a tool to determine whose contributed what via merging.