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.

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

WSS 3.0 Integration for TFS V1 Guidance Updated

The Guidance For TFS V1 integration with WSS 3.0 was updated on TechNotes Site

• TN1501: Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Application Tier
• TN1502: Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a Remote Server to work with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server

Hope that helps ...

VSTS for DB Professionals SP1 Pre-release

The DataDude team, aka the team that develops Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, has just published a preview of their first service release.

It's not just bug fixes, they've included a number of new features:

• 3+4 part name resolution through a new feature called "database references"
• File groups and files are now part of the project settings and can e fully parameterize then to fit your deployment needs (this replaces the need for the storage deployment script)
• SQLCMD variable support; this is enable through a new project property page for creating and editing variables that you can then use inside your scripts. Variables are stored inside the project file and can be mapped to MSBuild properties.

More details will be coming soon, but in the meantime check it out.

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

VS2005 Template for TFS Events Listening...

I've been trying to create my own TFS listening events and it was really a bit hard, until I came across Howard van Rooijen's VS2005 Template

It'll create the listner web services for TFS events, along with the appropriate signatures, as well as convert the events to an object, so that you can effectively use it.

Don't miss it ...

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 :)