Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
1,000,000 files in the dogfood system
Jeff Beehler just checked in another 100,000 files, pushing us over 1,000,000 files. We now have 1,042,659 files in the dogfood system. Brian Harry sent out a dogfood statistics update in email today, prior to Jeff's check-in. Watch for the latest stats on John Lawrence's blog.
Power Toy: tfpt.exe
[UPDATE 8/9/2007] I fixed the broken link to the power tools page. [UPDATE 9/8/2006] TFPT is now available in its own small download: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5422499! You no longer need to download the VS SDK. You can find more information about the September '06 release here.Back at the start of October, I wrote about the tfpt.exe power toy. The beta 3 version has been released with the October SDK release. In the future, we plan to have a better vehicle for delivering it.Here's the documentation, minus the screenshots, in case you are trying t...
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 VC runtime dlls that normally get installed as part of the VS installation.To work around this problem in beta 3, you can hook up a third-party diff tool. Just go to Tools->Options->Source Control->Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and click on Configu...
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 below so that you can get a better idea of what the upgrade will be like and let us know if you feel like we haven’t covered your scenario. Keep in mind that this isn’t final, but the actual upgrade will be similar to what’s described here. Allen Clark Prog...
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 dialog when the Source Control Explorer has focus. Also, it should appear on the Team menu.How about a power toy VS plugin to fill in the gaps?There are lots of things we'd like to do, but we can't at this point in the cycle. We are thinking about putting together a...
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 problem is that if you have a method on your web service that takes a String parameter, someone may call that method with a string that contains characters that are not allowed in XML. That input may come from a command line switch or a text box in a GUI. The XmlWriter use...
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 (substituting Joe Developer for an actual employee's name). It's another example of where customer feedback has had a significant impact on the product. We went round and round on what to do about this. For most of the product cycle TFS has used peoples' aliases ev...
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. It's only a few lines of code, and it uses the built-in event system support for sending emails. He even provides a link to a zip file with the solution.How to receive email on a Team Foundation check in policy violation[Update] He mentions in the post that the d...