Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
Please send error reports when prompted
A couple of months ago, Jeff Lucovsky wrote about filing watson reports for Team Foundation. When you log in as an administrator on the application tier for TFS, you may be greeted with a dialog asking if you would like to report errors to Microsoft. Likewise, if Visual Studio crashes, you may be asked to report the error to Microsoft. Please do this. Specific developers and testers for each of the components of TFS are responsible for making sure that the errors filed through the Microsoft error reporting service (aka Watson reports) are filed as bugs to be fixed. Each error re...
Jeff Beehler’s blogging
Tonight I stumbled across Jeff Beehler's new blog. So far he's written about our effort to upgrade our dogfood system to new code (we've been using a system based on the beta 2 release), which we'll release as a mid-July CTP.
Using baseless merge with converted VSS shared folders
In this forum thread, http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=18817, a question was asked about using baseless merge with converted VSS shared folders.[UPDATE Aug. 22, 2006] The GUI will not show the relatives of baseless merges, only explicit branch relationships.[UPDATE Feb. 6, 2006] I'm happy to say that baseless merges DO record history in the RC and RTM releases of TFS. I wouldn't normally go back and edit a post that's this old, but since people will find it using search engines, I want it to reflect the final v1 behavior.[UPDATE June 27] Unfortunately, it doesn't work ...
Don’t use the June CTP of SQL 2005 with Team Foundation
It's a question that's come up a lot lately. The June CTP of SQL 2005 will not work as the SQL backend for the current public releases of Team Foundation. There have been changes in SQL 2005 that require changes in TFS for it to work.
Skip the June CTP for Team Foundation
The June CTP of VS 2005 includes Team Foundation Server. However, this is not the June CTP discussed in the Team Foundation MSDN forums and elsewhere. That CTP is now scheduled for July (it was the last week of June, so it didn't change much). So, anywhere you've see a reference to the June CTP for TFS in the forums, think July CTP.The July CTP of TFS will include quite a few performance improvements, protocol changes (which means the just-released June CTP won't communicate properly with the upcoming July CTP of TFS), and nearly all of the code names are gone from assemblies...
CVS compared with Team Foundation Version Control
In the Team Foundation forum a question was asked regarding CVS compared to Team Foundation Version Control. Here's what I wrote. Of course, Team Foundation is much more than version control since we have integrated work item tracking, reporting, etc.I'm biased, of course, and I'm probably leaving stuff out. I've used CVS in the past, but I wasn't exactly a power user. Okay, here goes.TFS has atomic checkins. When you check in, it all succeeds or fails. No changes are committed unless the whole thing succeeds. CVS does not have this.TFS has shelving, and CVS does not. She...
How to use the TF version control command line from VS 2003 and other environments
We've had a lot of customer feedback on wanting integration in VS 2003, VB6, etc. The problem with the VS 2003 environment is that there can only be a single version of the CLR loaded into a process. VS 2003 loads 1.1. The TF source control integration requires that the 2.0 CLR be used. Thus, our VS integration code won't run in VS 2003. With other environments that don't load a particular CLR, there is the possibility of writing a plugin to provide TF source control integration.You can also use Team Foundation Client (which is being renamed Team Explorer) as a stand alone interface ...
VSTS Pricing Announcement
Pricing is an important topic, and I've written several posts about it. Today Rick LaPlante announced changes to the pricing of VSTS in response to customer feedback.Here's one part from Rick's post that I think will really make some people happy. One area where we received a lot of feedback was from smaller organizations looking to use Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. The ability to amortize the cost of the server over a large number of devs makes the Server exceptionally cheap on a per seat basis when you are thinking 20, 50, 100, 500 people per server. However when you are...
Team Foundation Hardware Requirements
Many folks are interested in guidance on hardware. In the Team Foundation forum, Brian Harry, Product Unit Manager of Team Foundation, posted the latest preliminary hardware requirements.If you are going with a single processor box (or if you want to maximize performance), I would recommend changing the warehouse update interval to reduce the load on the server.