Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
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 against and uses all of the final release versions of Visual Studio 2005, .NET 2.0, and SQL Server 2005. Beyond that, many of the fixes in it were to enhance the setup experience and to address a few localization issues. So, if you are wondering whether some particul...
Changing the encoding of a pending add works for RTM
I had mentioned in my September 10th post on file type detection that you couldn't change the encoding on a pending add, without undoing the add and re-adding it. While it won't work in beta 3 or beta 3 refresh, you'll be able to change the encoding on a pending add in the next public release. That means you can use the edit command with /type option from the command line or the properties dialog in the GUI to tweak the encoding before checking it in.
Displaying the sizes and dates of files in the server
Have you wished that the output of the dir command from tf.exe would show you the dates and sizes of the files like cmd.exe's dir command? Even though tf.exe won't do that in version 1, the version control API provides the call necessary. This little app is similar to my last post on displaying labels on a file. You can find a simple example of creating a workspace, pending changes, and so forth in my September API example. The GetItems() method is the key part of the app. Here's the declaration on the VersionControlServer class. public ItemSet GetItems(String path, RecursionType rec...
Displaying the labels on a file, including label comments
Unfortunately, there's not a fast, efficient way to see the list of labels in the system with the full comment without also seeing a list of all of the files included in a label. You also can't efficiently answer the question, "What labels involve foo.cs?" While this won't be changed for v1, you can certainly do it using code. I mentioned on the TFS forum that I'd try to put together a piece of code to do this. The result is the code below. The code is really simple to do this, but I ended up adding more to it than I originally intended. All that's reall...
Web Load Testing webcast Tuesday (Oct. 25) at 1:00 pm PST
If you want to learn more about web load testing in VSTS, you'll want to check out Ed Glas' webcast on Tuesday, Oct. 25. Brian Harry has been using VSTS load testing developed by Ed's group to answer the question, "How many users will your Team Foundation Server support?" Find out how you can do the same for your own web site or web service. MSDN Webcast: Load and Web Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Level 200) Start Time: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 1:00 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) End Time: Tuesday, Oct...
Team Foundation Beta 3 Virtual PC is headed your way
The beta 2 Virtual PC image was hugely popular. The new Team Foundation beta 3 VPC image is now making its way up to MSDN. So, later today or Monday you'll be able to download and run a single-server and client beta 3. Just make sure you have plenty of RAM since you'll be running everything on one machine (say 2GB+).
Beta 3 known bug when comparing large files: “Invalid access code (bad parameter).”
In the forum, Carl Daniel reported getting the message "Invalid access code (bad parameter)" when comparing two different versions of a file in Team Foundation Source Control Beta 3.Unfortunately this is a bug that was discovered and fixed after beta 3 was released. The problem is that large files (on the order of 500K) will crash the diffmerge.exe tool. I'm not certain as to the exact size that begins to trigger the problem.If you hit this bug, you'll need to work around it by using another diff tool until a newer public release fixes the problem (the upcoming beta 3 refresh will still have this...
September dogfood statistics
You can find the latest dogfood statistics on Brian's blog.[Update 10/12] John Lawrence also has the statistics as usual, including Excel charts. I saw Brian's, and I didn't think to check there.
SQL error in get with beta 3
On the forum, a couple of users have run into this issue with get, so I thought I would mention it here.There's a known issue in beta 3 where mapping a server path to a local path that exceeds the NTFS limit results in a SQL error message. The RTM code will give you a nice message to that effect rather than the SQL error message. A database error occurred (SQL error 8152) ---> String or binary data would be truncated. MyServer.TFSVersionControl..prc_Get: Database Update Failure - Error 8152 executing EXECUTESQL statement for #versionedItems The statement has been terminated.If you run into this...