TFS Code Coverage Check-in Policy

TFS Code Coverage Check-in Policy is now available on CodePlex.

The TFS Code Coverage Check-in Policy enforces that the latest test run of the current solution has code coverage enabled and that the total code coverage percentage is not below a certain, configurable, threshold value.

It reads the information from test results folder stored locally beneath the current solution.

To ensure that the user actually ran all the necessary tests, this check-in policy should be combined with the Testing check-in policy, that ensures that the user has executed all tests from a predefined test list.

Team System Web Access Translations

Some of Team System MVPs started working on creating some translations for Team System Web Access through CodePlex as the TSWA Community Translation Project

The great work resulted in 7 new languages that are now available through CodePlex as follows:

• Croatian
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Turkish
• Danish
• Swedish
• Polish
• Dutch

Another release is currently in progress that will contain:

• Norwegian
• Arabic
• Portugese

TFS Collaboration Providers

Team Foundation Server Collaboration Providers is a new CodePlex Project that targets Community Contribution for Collaboration providers for different IM and VoIP integration as the TFS 2008 Power Tools enables rich integration with other team members via IM and VoIP chat.

The Power Tools integrates with Live Communicator and Windows Live Messenger Out of the Box.

Skype Provider Initial version is now available as the first Collaboration Provider in the project with more to come ...

TFS to TFS Migration Tool Pre-Release Available on CodePlex!

Back in June the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit was released, the toolkit helps migrating data between 3rd party version control and bug tracking systems and TFS.

Having multiple locations and on site development arose the idea of having a TFS to TFS tool as well, so work was begun on writing a TFS to TFS migration tool based on the toolkit.

A pre-release of this TFS to TFS Migration Tool is now available on CodePlex!

This tool enables migration of work items and version control items with history between TFS servers. To learn more about the tool, you can visit the TFS to TFS Migration Tool page on CodePlex.

The purpose of this pre-release is for testing and stabilizing of the tool before officially releasing the tool.

VS 2005 TFS Power Tools Updated

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.

This release includes everything from the previous Power Tools release and includes two great new tools, the Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer and Work Item Templates.

Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer
This release of the Team Foundation Power Tools includes the first release of the Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer (Team Foundation Server BPA).

The Team Foundation Server BPA is a diagnostic tool that performs the following functions:

• Gathers configuration information from a Team Foundation Server deployment
• Performs specific tests on the Team Foundation Server deployment
• Analyzes the collected information according to specific rules and reports the findings as information, warning, or error messages
• Provides links to articles to resolve warning and error messages

You can use the Team Foundation Server BPA in either a pre-installation or a production Team Foundation Server environment. You can use the Team Foundation Server BPA to perform the following tasks:

• Proactively verify that the Team Foundation Server configuration is set according to recommended best practices
• Determine configurations that differ from default, recommended, or required settings
  Identify the source of problems in an unhealthy Team Foundation Server deployment

Work Item Templates
Team Foundation Power Tools installs a Work Item Templates feature that supports the ability to create, apply, capture, and set default work item templates. This feature adds additional menu items to the Team Work Item Templates menu.

You use work item templates to create or update work items. Work item templates automatically set field values. This feature conveniently reduces the number of steps to create or update work items. For example, you can create a task template that will set the area path, iteration path, and discipline whenever you use it to create or edit a task.

VSTS for DB Professionals SR1 Power Tools

VSTS for DB Professionals SR1 Power Tools is now available on MS

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools is a set of enhancements and tools that compliment and improve the user experience of Team Edition for Database Professionals

This release includes 5 new refactoring types, a new dependency viewer, additional data generators and editors, 2 new MSBuild tasks for Schema and Data Compare as well as the introduction of the TSQL Static Code Analysis feature

TSQL Static Code Analysis

• Static Code Analysis - A precursor to the functionality that will be in future versions of VSTS that will allow you to perform Static Code Analysis on T-SQL code.

Refactoring

• “Move Schema” Refactoring - Allows a user to right click on an object and move it to a different but existing schema
• SP Rename Generation - Generate a new script that will contain sp_renames for all rename refactored objects that the user can then execute.
• Wildcard Expansion - Automatically expand the wildcard in a select to the appropriate columns.
• Fully-Qualified Name Support - Automatically inject fully-qualified names when absent in a script
• Refactoring extended to Dataset - Refactor into strongly typed dataset definitions

MSBuild Tasks

• Data / Schema Compare Build Tasks - MSBuild tasks that can generate scripts as if the user had run the Data / Schema compare UI

Schema View

• API Access to Schema View - Insert / Update / Delete to schema View and list schema objects and their associated files

Dependency Tool Window

• Dependency Tree - Show the dependencies ( incoming / outgoing ) for selected schema objects in a new tool window

Miscellaneous Tools

• Script Preprocessor - Expand SQLCMD variables and include files and command line version (sqlspp.exe) & an MSBuild version ( wraps the command line version )

New Videos on ASP.NET for VSTS

Visual Studio Team System provides many ways for developers to extend the application build process, and in these videos they demonstrate how to automate builds, automate tests, and automate deployments.

• How Do I:Implement Continuous Integration with Team Foundation? (6 minutes, 25 seconds)
• How Do I:Automate Testing using Team Build? (6 minutes, 25 seconds)
• How Do I:Deploy a Web Application during a Team Build? (5 minutes, 50 seconds)

Team System Web Access Power Tool Available!

Team System Web Access Power Tool is released the as the first "official" power tool release of Team System Web Access. It can be downloaded from here.

When Microsoft first acquired DevBiz, they provided v1.0 of TeamPlain for download. Based on customer demand, they uploaded a preview of TeamPlain 2.0. Neither were supported by Microsoft customer support but both were available for download by all TFS licensed users.

With the release of the Team System Web Access Power Tool, several things have changed.

This version is based on the TeamPlain 2.0 code base but a great deal of work has gone into it since March.

Although, it is still not yet an officially released Microsoft product it has taken some great strides, including:

• Microsoft Customer Support Services will now support it.
• The code has been run through the Microsoft release process which is an extensive gauntlet of checks that help ensure quality. Among the more important ones is a security review to make sure the code is not susceptible to attack.
• MS have tested it to a moderate degree (including internally dogfooding it for a couple of months).
• It contains numerous bug fixes beyond what was in the last available download. Some notable ones include:
• Because of dogfooding they have made substantial additional performance improvements - particularly on first page load and work item load and save.
• They have re-branded it as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access
• They have improved some of the graphics and visuals.
• They removed all of the old licensing code that required separate keys to be entered.
• Improved error logging and added Dr. Watson support so reports of any crashes you experience can be sent to MS for investigation.

It also includes most of the features originally on the TeamPlain 2.0 feature list, including:

General Improvements

• Better, faster and easier with the new Ajax user interface
• Dramatic performance improvements for large team projects with a lot of work items, queries, area paths, and people
• Theme support for the user interface (and a new Olive theme)
• Manage alerts, subscribe to custom alerts
• Home page customizations
• Many dialogs open in their own window now, such as the work item editor, report viewer, file viewer and build results

Work Item Tracking

• Ajax style design to avoid page reloads and to provide live feedback about the status of the work items
• Work item type icons
• Context sensitive menus for work items
• Improved web controls to handle large datasets better
• Improved query editor with grouping
• Edit multiple work items at once (bulk editing)
• Add related work item
• Create copy of a work item
• Send work items and query results as email
• Copy queries between team projects

Build

• There is a new "Build" tab in this release, allowing to manage team builds.
• View the list of builds, and apply filters
• Start a new build
• Monitor build progress live
• View build logs, errors or warnings
• Stop running builds
• Delete a build
• Change the quality of a build

Source Control

• Faster browsing
• Visual Diff for text files
• Annotate (a.k.a. Blame)
• Download the latest or a previous version of a file

TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit

V1.0 of the Migration and Synchronization Toolkit has been released on CodePlex !!

The purpose of the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit is to enable customers of Team Foundation Server (TFS) to build custom tools that enable migration and synchronization with other version control (VC) and work-item tracking (WIT) systems. Customers have asked us for this toolkit to help them integrate TFS into their existing development environments. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Extending Load Testing Browser Support

The browser support Out Of The Box for Team Edition for Testers is minimal.

But, it can be extended by adding your own browsers (common ones you'll probably want to add are IE7, Firefox and Opera).

The configuration files for the browser types are stored in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Templates\LoadTest\Browsers.

The files end in the extension ".browser". These files simply contain the header information a browser sends with a request.

If you aren't sure of what information to enter in this file, simply open up your favorite browser that isn't in the list and go to http://www.ranks.nl/tools/envtest.html and grab the appropriate values!

Use the IE6.browser file as a template. For example, if you wanted to add support to test Opera you might add the following and save it as Opera.browser:

<Browser Name="Opera 8.0">
<Headers>
<Header Name="User-Agent" Value="Opera/8.00+(Windows+NT+5.1;+U;+en)" />
<Header Name="Accept" Value="text/html, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-bitmap, */*" />
<Header Name="Accept-Language" Value="en" />
<Header Name="Accept-Encoding" Value="GZIP" />
</Headers>
</Browser>

There are obviously other values you can place here and some of this will be dependent on your locale, plug-ins you have loaded and other environmental factors. Once you save this file, you should be able to go in and create a new load test and Opera 8.0 will now show up as an option in your browser mix list.

Project Server 2007 - TFS Connector

The Project Server 2007 - TFS Connector has been released on CodePlex.

The Visual Studio Team System Project Server 2007 Connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities of VSTS with Project Server 2007.
It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution. Future versions of Team System will have native integration with Project Server, in the meantime this Connector solution is the best way to integrate the two Microsoft products.

TFS Reporting Simplified using TFS Data Source Control

Kannan wrote two great posts on how to create a TFS Data Source Control and how to create a TFS Report leveraging the use of this control.

You can check the posts on the following links:

• TFS Data Source ASP.NET Control
• TFS Reporting Simplified

TFS V1 Integration to WSS 3.0 Revisited !

It was officially announced that TFS V1 will not support WSS 3.0 awhile ago and I had my own post on that, but since countless requests are being sent to MS for having that solved before Orcas' release, they managed to have that working using a great group of MCS consultants and VSTS team members that did much of the leg work to flesh out the solution and test it thoroughly

It's still not an easy process and it still involves some unusual steps but it can be checked out on http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2007/04/14/Configuring-Visual-Studio-2005-Team-Foundation-Server-with-Windows-SharePoint-Services-3.0.aspx till it's officially released. It's still a "Pre-Release" so it's own your own risk still :)

TeamPlain is now Free for TFS Customers!!

As part of an acquisition made by Microsoft over devBix, TeamPlain is now free for TFS Customers. It can be downloaded here.

Check the PressPass.

Thanks Microsoft for the great addition ...

TeamPlain Web Access is a web interface for Microsoft® Team Foundation
Server that allows managing work items, shared documents, reports and source control repositories.

• Streamlines Team System usage
• Enables broader participation to development lifecycle
• Allows cross platform access to Team Foundation Server (TFS)
• Enables fine grained security configurations not present in TFS
• Helps organizations to leverage their Team System migration and adoptation

TFS Work Item Management Outlook Addin

The SRL Team has released an Addin for MS Outlook that connects to TFS.

You can generate a Work Item right from MS Outlook. You can view queries, you can search your work items, you can even generate a work item based on content from an email.

Subject can be mapped to task title, body to description, or any field can by mapped to anything else.

Customising TFS Builds with MSBuild Tasks

I just came acrossa great help for customizing TFS Builds, The MSBuild Community Tasks Project which is an open source project for MSBuild tasks. The goal of the project is to provide a collection of open source tasks for MSBuild.

Visual Studio 4.0 SDK is Now Available Including Updates to TFS Extensibility Documentation

The Visual Studio 4.0 SDK was released early March '07.

On behalf of the VS Tools Ecosystem team, we are pleased to announce that after months of hard work, we have completed shipping the VS SDK 4.0 RTM release! We have done tons of work to make this release friendly to developers who are new to Visual Studio extensibility. It is available for immediate download on the Microsoft Download Center.

We are excited to present some of the new features included in this release:

• VS SDK Browser – the new entry-point to the entire SDK; includes new QuickStart Tutorials and a completely revamped sample browsing experience
• Package Load Analyzer – allows developers to easily debug package load failures
• Toolbox Installer redistributable package – allows component vendors that simplifies deployment, along with sample
• TFS Contents – new and updated TFS samples and documentation
• Sandcastle – new set of tools for generating managed class library documentation (Sandcastle)
• Updated Setup experience
• And much more!

Here's what's new in it for TFS in particular.
Team Foundation Server Extensibility

• New Work Item Custom Control API Sample and Help Documentation
• Demonstrates how to use the Work Item Custom Control APIs introduced in Visual Studio 2005 SP1.
• New Version Control Merge History API Documentation
• Demonstrates how to use the enhanced QueryMergesWithDetails API introduced in Visual Studio 2005 SP1.
• Updated Team Explorer PcwTESample
• This sample can be found in \VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Team Explorer and Project Creation\PcwTESample\.
• Fixed problems that prevented the sample from building.
• Updated Team Foundation Server Collectibles Sample
• This sample can be found in \VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Team Foundation Core Services\ExtendingTeamFoundationSample\.
• Re-written to use best practices.
• Updated ReadMe.doc to reflect new architecture.
• All Team Foundation Server Pubic Assemblies Updated to Visual Studio 2005 SP1
• These assemblies can be found in \VisualStudioIntegration\Common\Assemblies\.
• Updated Team Foundation Server BisSubscribe.exe Tool
• This tool was updated to the RTM version and can be found in \VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Utilities\EventSubscriptionTool\.
• The SDK version of this tool now provides unsubscribe capability.
• Added Visual Studio Team Explorer Package GUID’s, Menu ID’s and Group ID’s Header Files
• The newly provided header file contains the constants required for integrating with existing Team Explorer shortcut menus when you create Visual Studio Integration Package projects. The TFS_VC_IDs.h file can be found in \VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Version Control\ and the TFS_WIT_IDs.h file can be found in \VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Work Item Tracking\.