Buck Hodges
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)
Latest posts
A tool to find duplicate copies in a build
As part of our builds, quite a few projects copy files to the binaries directory or other locations. These can be anything from image files to test scripts. To have our builds complete more quickly, we use the multi-process option (/maxcpucount) of msbuild to build projects in parallel. This all sounds normal, so what’s the problem? In a large team, people will sometimes inadvertently add statements to different project files that copy files to the same destination. When those project files have no references to each other, directly or indirectly, msbuild may build them in parallel. ...
How to subscribe to checkins not under a particular path
Nick Kirchem, who works on the TFS web access team, recently answered a question on how email subscriptions on checkin alerts. The question was, how do I subscribe to checkin alerts not under a particular folder? Here’s how to do it. bissubscribe /eventType CheckinEvent /address someone@domain.com /deliveryType EmailHtml /server http://myserver:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection "'Artifacts/Artifact[@ArtifactType=\"VersionedItem\"][not(starts-with(translate(@ServerItem, \"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\", \"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz\"), \"$/devdiv/feature/build/qa\"))]...
How to delete a team project from Team Foundation Service (tfs.visualstudio.com)
[UPDATE 9/13/13] You can now use the web UI to delete a team project. [UPDATE 5/14/13] Updated the URLs and version of VS (used to say preview) The question came up as to how to delete a team project in the Team Foundation Service (TFService). When I first tried it, it didn’t work. Then I realized it’s the one case where you have to explicitly specify the collection name. It’s surprising because in hosted TFS each account has only one collection. You cannot create multiple collections currently as you can with on-premise TFS (this will change at some point in the future...
Now on Twitter: tfsbuck
With the build conference last week, I got a Twitter account and started following the comments and responding to questions. I’m @tfsbuck.
TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 available (again)
Brian posted about the cumulative update for TFS (the TFS SKU, not the client/VS) back in June. After it was released we learned of a couple of bugs in it, including one where upgrades would not work in certain cases. Last Thursday, we re-released it with all of the known bugs fixed. We understand where we went wrong, and we apologize for the inconvenience. You should apply this update to the server, build machine, proxy, and SharePoint extensions – all of the things that the TFS SKU installs. SP1 is a pre-requisite (i.e., this patch does not include SP1). Download: http://www.micr...
Patch to improve perf and reliability of the Workflow Designer
Today the .NET team is releasing a cumulative update patch. This has all of the QFEs up until a couple of months ago rolled into one patch. Included as part of that is a patch for WPF that improves the performance of the Windows Workflow Designer as well as a hang that a number of folks have hit. I had a few customers try it out, and they were happy with the improvements. I recommend this update to you if you work with the WF Designer (e.g., editing the workflow for Team Build definitions). There are still perf issues even with this fix, and the WF Designer team has made some very go...
Knowing which thread BackgroundWorker will use for its events
[UPDATE 7/19/2011] Stephen pointed me to his article covering this and more in February issue of MSDN Magazine, and I recommend it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg598924.aspx.We hit this recently, so I thought I’d post this email from Chad, a developer on version control, for anyone else who may have missed this subtlety. Today we discovered some of our code was making an incorrect assumption about the behavior of BackgroundWorker, so I thought it might be useful to send a note detailing what we found. Our code assumed BackgroundWorker would always call ProgressChanged and RunWorker...
Updates to our docs on MSDN last month
The fine folks who write documentation for our product are woefully outnumbered. Every month they release updates to the docs, adding new topics and enhancing existing ones. You can find the latest set of updates described on their blog.
Ewald’s posts on TFS Build 2010
Ewald Hofman, an ALM MVP, has written a great series of blog posts on Team Build in Team Foundation Server 2010. The 2010 release introduces Windows Workflow as the overall orchestrator of the build process. Ewald walks you through quite a few topics related to this and the other new features. Check it out! Technorati Tags: tfs 2010,team build,windows workflow