TFS Powerful Easy Reports Add-In

TFS ships with a number of reports that allow you to track your progress of a project but modifying or creating new reports in Microsoft Visual Studio™ can prove to be challenging. Radius, from 90 Degree Software, integrates directly with TFS and delivers a powerful but easy to use reporting solution that allows you to rapidly create and use reports based on existing TFS queries.

The Radius Advantage:

• Powerful and easy to use: Radius delivers report designers with an easy-to-use, yet powerful, reporting solution. The results-oriented user interface, designed to look and feel like Microsoft Office 2007, intuitively provides users with quick access to the features they need most, right when they need them. People who are already familiar with tools like Microsoft Office Word, Excel or PowerPoint will intuitively pick up and use Radius features with little instruction. As a result, report designers can create, modify and deploy user specific reports that are meaningful, interactive, and meet the needs of their diverse end-users, and they can do this quickly, increasing productivity.
• The Radius TFS add-in: Provides TFS users the ability to use an existing team or personal TFS workitem query as the report query. The user is then able to proceed in creating visual report objects such as tables, charts and matrixes. The add-in also allows the project manager to quickly define filters based on TFS items such as AssignedTo values. The project manager can define custom groups of developers to filter the report quickly without needing to define this in the TFS query. Once the project manager has added the TFS query or queries to the report all of the report design features are available.
• Search, Reuse and Securely Share: One of the powerful features Radius provides is the ability to search, re-use, and securely share any report or report component. As a result of leveraging existing reports and report components, organizations can decrease report deployment time, reduce the time, and costs required, to deploy reports.

The tool is really worth the check ...

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.

TFSServerManager PowerTool

BHarry, is working on a great tool called TFSServerManager that contains lots of capabilities mainly for dogfood statistics, it should be checked out on his post

I can't wait to see it out and start using it...

What Can TFS Tell You?

Throughout the software development life cycle countless data streams into the TFS data warehouse.
It takes many data points to illustrate a trend and guide decision making for managing a project.
The two process templates that ship with TFS include a number of reports for visualizing this data. However, do they answer the questions you're asking, or the questions your stakeholders are asking you?

The TFS Reporting team developed a brief (15-minute) survey to assess your reporting needs as they working their way on the next release of the product.
By participating in this survey, you may very well save yourself the time of creating your own custom reports. Take the survey and let your needs be known! Team Foundation Server Reporting Survey

Advanced Load Testing Features of Visual Studio Team System

Bill Barnett, a Software Design Engineer in Microsoft, wrote a great article on MSDN describing all the bits and pieces of Load Test features in VSTS.

Visual Studio Team Test Edition provides two capabilities that can allow
users to create load tests of web sites quickly and easily: the Web Test
recorder and the Load Test wizard. In fact, these tools make this process so
easy that it is tempting to use the web tests and the load tests that result
from using these tools without much modification. However, to use the web
testing and load testing capability most effectively it is beneficial to
understand how to use other web test and load test properties that are not set
by these tools. This note describes some of the most important considerations
for load testing with Visual Studio Team System that are not addressed by the
web test recorder and the load test wizard.