Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
VSTS Load Test team bloggers: Ed Glas, Bill Barnett, Josh Christie
One of the many great parts of Visual Studio Team System is Load Testing. As one of the three original projects here in the Durham, North Carolina office, it was known as Ocracoke originally (Version Control was Hatteras, and Work Item Tracking was Currituck -- all three are islands in the North Carolina Outer Banks).The Load Testing team continues to ramp up on blogging. In addition to Josh Christie, Ed Glas, group manager, and Bill Barnett, developer, have started blogging. Other team members that don't have their own blogs will also be contributing posts. It's a great way to l...
Baseless merges now record history
Back in June, I wrote a post on using baseless merges to establish a merge relationship between two items where neither was branched from the other. A week after I posted it, I had to go back and change it to say that baseless wouldn't record merge history for v1, and thus you would only be able to merge items where one was a branch of the other.I'm happy to say that's been fixed both for the RC (available tomorrow) and RTM (available in March)!So, if you have two folders, projectX and skunkWorksX, where neither is a branch of the other, you can establish a merge history between the two by running "tf merge...
How to add the Team Foundation assemblies to the .NET tab in the VS Add Reference dialog
To write an app using the Team Foundation API, you're going to need to reference assemblies that are in the GAC. It's not possible to add a reference to a .NET assembly in the GAC in VS when you need to add a reference to an assembly.The GAC'ed Team Foundation assemblies are also copied to the PrivateAssemblies folder under the VS directory. When you want to add a reference to a TFS assembly in VS solution, you can choose Browse and find the assembly.To make it more convenient, you can also add the TFS assemblies to the .NET tab in the Add Reference dialog. This knowledge base article ...
Migrating CVS and Subversion repositories to Team Foundation Server
A number of users have asked about converting existing CVS and Subversion repositories to Team Foundation Server. While we have no plans to produce such, we had hoped third parties would. Today someone from Component Software posted an announcement of such a converter.Here's the description from their web page. CS-Converter is a powerful and reliable conversion tool, used to migrate from various legacy version control systems (such as RCS, CVS, Subversion and Visual SourceSafe) to Microsoft Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) system.Disclaimer: I don't have any relationship with the company, haven'...
Locks based on file types (extensions) and shelving
Recently, someone asked about locks, shelving, and buddy builds (i.e., shelving your changes and unshelving and building them in another workspace to make sure everything builds cleanly). I am trying to add a number of files into our source control. The list of files I want to add contains a few each of .ico and .bmp, and one .xls files, all which get locked (locked to prevent check-out) when I add them, presumably because they cannot be merged if someone else checks them out and changes them. The fact that they get locked seems to deny the possibility of buddy building, even on my own second machine, ...
Disabling or changing output colors used by the command line (tf.exe)
In the forum, a user asked how to turn off the colors used in the output of the version control command line for Team Foundation (tf.exe). I thought I'd repost it here.Question When tf.exe (beta 3 refresh version) displays an error message the text is colored in yellow on black. My command prompt windows usually have black text on white background. Is it possible to let tf. exe display all output without changing the color, e.g. via an environment variable?Answer You can change or turn off the coloring by changing the settings in tf.exe.config (in the same location as tf.exe). Here is the list of display...
Beta TFS MSSCCI plugin now available for VB6, VC6 (not yet VS 2002/2003)
Brian Harry announced the availability of the beta TFS MSSCCI plugin for VB6, VC6 (not yet VS 2002/2003).You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32202966-EF04-442F-8C5C-88BDF15F551C&displaylang=en.Buck
How to improve command line performance
If you are using the tf.exe command line in scripts to convert from another version control system or to run other tasks that involve a lot of calls, there are several factors that have a large impact on the performance. Other than the command files, all of the following applies to Visual Studio as well, but VS has the significant advantage of amortizing one-time overhead across a long execution time. The command line pays one-time costs every time it runs, so it's important to minimize those costs when performance matters.Check LAN connection settings (applies now and for RTM)First, ch...
Backing up and restoring Team Foundation
Rob Caron posted a link to the re-launched VSTS User Education team blog. It includes a post of the procedures for backing up and restoring Team Foundation Server. That includes the databases, SharePoint, reports, etc. It also includes restoring TFS to a different server. There have been lots of requests for this in the forum, so now's the time to give it a try.They have also posted documentation on permissions and the default groups, roles, and permissions.Since this is pre-release documentation, be sure to email them with any problems in the documentation.[Update 3/2/06] You c...