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)

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 ...

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.

Patterns & Practices Team Development with TFS Guide

Patterns & Practices Team Development with TFS Guide Beta 1 is release on CodePlex

This guide shows you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server. It starts with the end in mind, but shows you how to incrementally adopt TFS for your organization. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

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

Team Foundation Source Control Guidelines ...

Team Foundation Source Control Guidelines are now available. It can be read online in HTNL or downloaded in PDF format.

The guidelines are part of the patterns & practices - Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project on CodePlex.

It can be used to encapsulate strategies and convey recommendations.
Each guideline is written using a "What to do", "Why" and "How" approach to help make them easy to consume.

Deleting Team Builds ...

Been trying to remove some Testing Build Types that I created while playing with Team Build and got really lost, so I thought it might be helpful for playing geeks like me :)

Actually it's very easy ... All you have to do is go to Source Control Explorer, Get latest from the TeamBuildsTypes Project, remove those Builds you no longer need, and then Check in them back again ... Voila :)

Same applies to Editing Team Build types ... you have to check them out first ...

Hope that was helpful ...

VSTS Guidance ...

Visual Studi Team System Guidance is now available on CodePlex

The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

TFS Branching Guidance ...

TFS Branching Guidance is now available on CodePlex

The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around doing branching and merging using Team Foundation Server. It's a collaborative effort between industry experts, Microsoft Services, patterns & practices, and VSTS team members.

Work Item Tracking ...

Brian A. Randel just published a great article on Work Item Tracking. It can be found on MSDN VS2005 Technical Articles

The Work Item Tracking subsystem offered by Team Foundation Server exposes a rich object model for integration with your own solutions. Accessing work item information from any application only requires a few lines of code. In addition, when building an application, you can let the built-in controls do the heavy lifting to provide a rich and consistent interface. In the next column, I'll show you how to integrate work item support into the add-in that I started in the previous column.

Performance Testing Guidance

Patterns & Practices: Performance Testing Guidance is now available on CodePlex.

The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around doing performance testing and using Visual Studio 2005.

It's a collaborative effort between industry experts, Microsoft ACE, Patterns & Practices, Premier, and VSTS team members.

Usage Scenarios:

• Improve efficiency and effectiveness of your performance testing
• Learn expert techniques performance testing
• Apply expert techniques for performance testing using Visual Studio.NET 2005

Database Unit Testing with VSTS for DB Professionals

Sachin Rekhi just published his detailed whitepaper on Database Unit Testing.

It can be found on MSDN VS2005 Technical Articles

Summary: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals is the first toolset to deliver a comprehensive framework for performing database unit tests. This product brings to the data community the same first-class capabilities for performing unit tests that many application developers enjoy today. This paper explains exactly what database unit testing is, shows you how to develop database unit tests by using the framework, and walks you through how to leverage its rich capabilities to develop an effective strategy for performing database unit tests inside your organization.

TFS Guidance Whitepaper

Willy-Peter Schaub, a Team System MVP, has posted a Team Foundation Server Guidance White Paper summarizing good practices used in the field. Check it out.

Analyzing Application Performance

Performance tools in VSTS for Developers allow developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance-related issues in their code. These tools are fully integrated into the IDE to provide a seamless and approachable user experience. The performance tools support two methods of profiling: sampling and instrumentation.

You can check all the needed info about the Performance Tools on MSDN.

TFS SP1 Installation Problems

For a while now people are struggling with some TFS SP1 installation issues. The majority of issues come down to a tool called TFSQuiesce.exe, that is responsible to "shutdown" TFS while performing the SP1 upgrade and restart it when it is done. Most issues with it are that for some reason, it does not always shutdown all services and it does not always restart them properly - leaving your server in an inoperable state. The good news is that it is almost always easy to recover from.

Customer Scenarios

The following scenarios describe the vast majority of issues seen around SP1.

	Issue	Customer Impact	Workarounds/Next Steps
1	SP1 fails to install on a SQL Cluster	Blocked from installing SP1 or any other DT patches.	None. Look for a patch/work around coming in the next couple of weeks.
2	SP1 install fails and: TFS databases in single-user mode IIS in state where remote connections are declined	AT won’t start an errors reported in Event Log. Http 403 forbidden error with browsers TF2101 message from TE (can't connect)	To get running (without SP1): Databases must be manually placed back in multi-user mode. Use SQL Management Studio; right click on each TFS database; select properties; Select the Options page; At the very bottom there is an item called "restrict access" - set it to "multi_user". There is a KB article in the works and should be published soon. IIS must be manually configured to accept remote connections - See section 6.9 of the SP1 Known issues doc below. To install SP1: Manually put remaining databases in single-user mode and retry installation. Use SQL Management Studio; right click on each TFS database; select properties; Select the Options page; At the very bottom there is an item called "restrict access" - set it to "single_user". This will not always work if other people are trying to use the database at the same time.
3	SP1 install succeeds but leaves IIS in state where remote connections are declined	Http 403 forbidden error with browsers TF2101 message from TE (can't connect)	IIS must be manually configured to accept remote connections - See section 6.9 of the SP1 Known issues doc below.
4	Users can’t uninstall SP1 Beta after installing Quiescing	The Quiescing logic breaks the Beta from uninstalling but you can’t uninstall Quiescing from Add/Remove programs because it doesn’t appear there if SP1 Beta is installed. (A chicken and egg issue.) The SP1 RTM will not allow you to install if the SP1 Beta is installed.	Run a manual uninstall operation from the command-line. See the steps at the bottom of this post... Uninstall TFS SP1 Beta - using Add/Remove Programs.
5	SP1 fails to install	These error are usually due to changes in configuration after RTM installation that our setup does not handle well. In some cases the customers are left with an unusable server.	Requires a review of the install logs for more details on the specific error and then ultimately identify the configuration change that broke the installer.

Here is a link to an SP1 Known Issues page. Most of these "issues" aren't new problems with SP1 but rather just common issues that people run into with TFS and what you can do about them.

VSTS TechNotes

A great resource I got across ... VSTS TechNotes

TechNotes are short, focused technical articles that explain a specific
concept or walk through a particular scenario. TechNotes are intended to
supplement the product documentation and technical articles. In addition, we
have brought together some of our very best blog postings in a central
location.

Generating documentation from code with Team Build

Brian Keller replied to an internal email thread discussing generating documentation from code as part of a build. Check the below links if you would like to do the same.

I just wanted to point out that there are several MSBuild targets available
for Sandcastle which should make
it pretty straightforward to integrate with Team Build. I was actually at one of
my customer’s offices yesterday and they were showing me that they had
integrated Sandcastle with their build process and it looked quite good. I
haven’t tried using these targets yet so I can’t tell you which one is best, but
between the three of them you should find something which works for your
customer:

• Mike Diehl’s blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/miked/archive/2006/08/06/Sandcastle-MSBuild-target.aspx
• CodePlex project: http://www.codeplex.com/MSBuildSandcastle
• Richard Murillo’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/rimuri/archive/2006/10/30/reusable-msbuild-sandcastle-targets-file.aspx

Getting Code Coverage Without Tests ...

The following steps shows how to get code coverage on .NET applications without having to actually run "tests" in the VSTS context. You will need either VSTS for Developers, VSTS for Testers, or VSTS Team Suite Edition installed to have the right tools to make it work.

Using the commandline you can instrument any .NET assembly, but beware of code signing as it might cause problems. Once the code is instrumtented, you need to get the "listener" running to collect the code coverage data generated, as follows:

1. Open a VS command prompt
2. Instrument your assembly by executing:
   vsinstr /coverage Assemblyname.dll
3. Start the Code Coverage monitoring process by executing:
   vsperfcmd /start:coverage /output:yourfilename.coverage
4. Run your Application that contains the instrumented code
5. End the Code Coverage monitoring process by executing:
   vsperfcmd /shutdown
6. Open the file "yourfilename.coverage" found in your application directory in Visual Studio to view the results.

TFSWarehouse Cube Corruption

Ever got your TFSWarehouse Cube corrupted?

One of the reasons I got that corruption was due to machine failure that corrupted some of the cube's XML files, I spent quite some time trying to figure out the problem and how to solve it, but luckily I got to fix it easily in 4 steps.

1. Open SQL Management and Stop the TFS Analysis Service on the TFS Data Tier.
2. Go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\OLAP\Data" on the TFS Data Tier, and delete the folder TFSWarehouse.0.db and the XML file TFSWarehouse.0.db.xml
3. Run the following command on the TFS Data Tier to rebuild the cube, it can be found in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools"SetupWarehouse -o -s TFSServer -d TFSWarehouse -c warehouseschema.xml -a TFSServiceAccount -ra TFSReportsAccount -mturl http://TFSServer:8080
4. Start the TFS Analysis Service on the TFS Data Tier and Process the cube to get back on track.

That's all you need to do. Hope that will help ...

VSTS Load Test Simulating Browser Cache

Below are some notes that can allow the Load Test containg Web Tests to attempt simulating the caching behavior of the browser

• There is a property named on each request in a Web test named “Cache Control” in the Web test editor (and named “Cache” on the WebTestRequest object in the API used by coded Web tests)
• When the Cache Control property on a request in the Web test is false, the request is always issued.
• When the Cache Control property is true, the VSTS load test runtime code attempts to emulate the Internet Explorer caching behavior (with the “Automatically” setting) as described in this article:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwebgen/html/ie_introfiddler2.asp?frame=true
  (This includes reading and following the HTTP cache control directives.)
• The Cache Control property is automatically set to true for all dependent requests (typically for images, style sheets, etc embedded on the page).
• In a load test, the browser caching behavior is simulated separately for each user running in the load test.
• When a virtual user in a load test completes a Web test and a new Web test session is started to keep the user load at the same level, sometimes the load test starts simulates a “new user” with a clean cache, and sometimes the load test simulates a return user that has items cached from a previous session.
  This is determined by the “Percentage of New Users” property on the Scenario in the load test.
  The default for “Percentage of New Users” is 100 in which case all user sessions are started with a clean cache.
  This is probably not correct for most applications where there are return users, so users should consider the most appropriate value to use for this setting depending on the actual usage of the application being load tested.

There was a bug in the original release of Visual Studio 2005 Team System that is fixed by the SP1 update where the load test was not honoring the “max-age” cache control directive.