Thursday, September 28, 2006

VS 2005 and TFS Service Pack 1 Beta

Visual Studio 2005 and TFS Service Pack 1 Beta is now available on Microsoft Connect, the Service Pack includes bug fixes, performance enhancements, and some new features for Team Foundation. It can be downloaded by registering on Connect.

What's Fixed in SP1

The service pack includes the following improvements for Team Foundation:

Support for Microsoft Office 2007

With this service pack, Team Foundation now supports working with Microsoft Office 2007 Project and Excel. Team Foundation is supported for use with Microsoft Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh, or later.

Note: At this time there is no support for Microsoft SharePoint 2007, so don't use Team Foundation Server with Microsoft SharePoint 2007 just yet.

Support for Web Application Projects

With this service pack, Team Foundation now supports working with Web Application Projects.

Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

The Team Foundation product team collected and analyzed all of the crashes that were uploaded through Dr. Watson crash analysis system. The top issues that accounted for a significant majority of all crashes that customers experienced or reported are fixed in this service pack.

This service pack includes 85 Team Foundation issues (including the features listed below). This includes all fixes that were delivered to customers as QFEs through the customer support team.

The following issue areas are addressed in the service pack:

  • 15 Microsoft Office integration issues to support Excel & Project 2007.
  • 8 reporting issues to improve performance and scalability and provide support for moving the Analysis Services database.
  • 8 administration and operations issues that address several Watson reported bugs and provide basic authentication support.
  • 38 version control issues that are mostly performance improvements based on analysis of internal usage of Team Foundation Server at Microsoft, and support for the new Web application projects and other fixes.
  • 13 work item tracking issues that address the GC handle object model problem, provide custom work item controls, and more.
Release Notes

The release notes for this beta release of this service pack are available online:

New Team Foundation Features

This service pack also includes some new functionality for Team Foundation, the documentation for which is still under development. Once it is available, I'll be sure to let you know.

Basic Authentication and Digest Authentication Support

An ISAPI filter that enables you to deploy Team Foundation Server more easily in environments where Internet users need access to Team Foundation Server without using a VPN connection.

Custom Controls in Work Item Types

You can now embed custom controls on your work item forms. You can persist custom control data in work item type fields, or elsewhere.

Detailed Merge History

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server only provides summary data on merge history. This makes it difficult to build any sophisticated change tracking tools that track the flow of changes through branches. This service pack includes a new Web service method and object model API that provides detailed merge history data. The new API is named QueryMergesWithDetails and is available on the SourceControl object.

Move the Data Warehouse SQL Server Analysis Services Database to a Separate Server

You can now increase the capacity and performance of your Team Foundation Server database tier by moving the SQL Server Analysis Services database to a separate server. After you move the database, the data tier is composed of two computers: the relational data-tier server, and the analysis services data-tier server.

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