We recently got awesome new laptops at work (which are just awesome BTW) and on the standard image included a Team Foundation Server tool that I haven’t used in a while:  TeamCompanion 3.0.  I had used earlier releases of the tool but always seem to forget to install it whenever I pave my machine as I do quite frequently.  It’s been a while and I must say… the 3.0 version is just awesome.  I’d like to go over a few things that I really like in the latest release.

Experience

The experience of connecting to TFS inside Outlook is just first-class.  The same icons that are used in Visual Studio Team Explorer are the ones that appear in Outlook.  That really does make a difference for me…  Notice that I can also add certain work item queries that I’m interested in to the Favorites area as well.

If you are using Outlook 2010, you’ll notice that TeamCompanion adds a handy ribbon tab:

Work Items Galore

There are so many things you can do whenever working with work items with TeamCompanion!  For instance, let’s say you get an e-mail for a customer of a great feature request.  It’s super quick to create a new feature request work item or attach the e-mail to an existing work item.

What’s even cooler is that if the e-mail refers to a specific work item in the content (i.e. “Bug 1234”) then TeamCompanion can let you open the rich work item form to look at the details or edit the work item.  This is especially helpful for alert e-mails that you may get from TFS.

Even cooler is that all of the normal Outlook features work like replying, forwarding, flagging, categorizing, setting alerts, etc.

Other Work Item Features:

• Offline Work Item Support
• Scheduling Work Item Queries to Run
• Great Rendering of a Work Item
• Creating Tasks/Meeting Requests from Work Items
• Printing
• Editing Areas & Iterations
• Bulk Editing
• Searching Work Items
• “Query By Example”

Reports

I think my favorite feature of TeamCompanion has to do with handling reports.  By default, the rich reports you get with TFS are all scoped at the Team Project level.  However, I find myself frequently needing to filter to a particular Area Path and Iteration Path.  TeamCompanion actually allows you to save those common filters that you perform every day and store them.  Allows you to have all of the presets that you want.

Another handy feature is the ability to send an e-mail with the report easily within Outlook.  Nice!

I’m certainly not doing the latest release of the product justice.  They did a great job with improvements and new features from previous versions that I have used.  I’d suggest you’d download the trial and kick the tires.

Ed Blankenship

Some of the Visual Studio ALM MVPs have gotten together to drive the creation of a new Stack Exchange site dedicated to the Visual Studio ALM family of products (which includes Team Foundation Server.)  We were able to get past the “Definition” phase and now need to enough people to “Commit” to using it so that we can get the site off the ground.  If you aren’t familiar with the Stack Exchange concept, it’s an interesting way to ask questions and help answer them as well.  One of the sites that has been around for a while that I have participated in from time to time is Stack Overflow.  You basically end up with high-quality answers because others can agree/disagree with the answer and provide feedback or more information.

Help us out by indicating that you are going to commit to contributing to the site whenever it gets created.  Thanks for all your help!

Link:  Commit to Visual Studio ALM at Stack Exchange

Ed Blankenship

There is a great article in the August 1, 2010 edition of the SD Times by Dave Worthington (@dcworthington) about the Visual Studio 2010 ALM tools including Team Foundation Server 2010.  It’s titled “Microsoft’s islands in the stream.”  Some really great colleagues in the ALM community have been interviewed and provided some pretty honest feedback from what we have been seeing over the last year or so.  Check it out!

Ed Blankenship

This is some really exciting news for customers of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010!  Today, Microsoft has announced that customers who have purchased Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN or Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional with MSDN now receive the Lab Management capabilities for Team Foundation Server!  That means no per-processor licensing fees for your physical host servers that will be hosting your virtual machines!

Earlier this year, I passed on Lab Management news that indicated that it would cost $1,599 per processor (retail.)  Microsoft has listened to the feedback and has also made it a “feature” in the Visual Studio family instead of a completely separate product.

Microsoft has also announced an update to the Lab Management functionality in the different products to bring it to full RTM/RTW status.  You’ll recall that when Visual Studio 2010 released earlier this year that the Lab Management features ended up still being released in a “Release Candidate” status.  The product team has spent the last few months gathering feedback and include updates to improve performance throughout the product.  The “patch” will be available later this month.  I highly recommend updating to the latest version by installing the patch as soon as it becomes available.

When it is released, you will see the following “extra” installation media become available in your MSDN Subscriber Download listings:

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager* (SCVMM)
• Visual Studio 2010 Agents

*A grant of “limited use” rights for SCVMM are included.  This means that you can only use SCVMM for your Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management test lab.

This is a great move for customers.  Creating a virtual lab management can be an expensive endeavor for business.  I recall visiting customers who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on competing products like VMWare Lab Manager.  This is really bringing virtual lab management to everyone!

If you are curious about more information, see Brian Harry’s announcement.

Ed Blankenship

For quite a while, the Developer Division at Microsoft continued to use their internal build systems to build Visual Studio.  TFS Build had only been used by certain teams within the division but not standard across the division.  I had the opportunity to visit one of the huge build labs last time I was in Redmond and it’s impressive.  It was just one of them too.   I really got an appreciation for the complexity that was involved in building .NET, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server.   We’re talking huge builds that take up a lot of time.

Brian Harry just mentioned that they had hit a huge milestone for the division during their MQ phase and have gotten a build to run through the TFS 2010 Build system!  Sounds like they still have some work to go to get it tuned but getting a Visual Studio build through TFS Build is huge accomplishment!  Looks like they have even taken some of the experiences they gathered and already integrated improvements into the next version of the product.  That just benefits all of us as customers whenever Microsoft is eating their own dogfood. 

Congratulations!

Ed Blankenship

One of my favorite new build workflow activities is the FindingMatchingFiles activity.  It’s an activity that is provided out of the box for use during Team Build that returns an IEnumerable<string> of all of the files that match a particular wild card string.

It’s available in the toolbox under the Team Foundation Build Activities tab.  The full name of the activity is:  Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities.FindMatchingFiles.

Here is a typical usage if you are looking for all .CSS files in a particular folder.

The problem I was attempting to solve is how to find all of the files recursively in all of the subfolders as well.  All I had to do was change the match pattern argument to include a “**” in front of the original pattern and it worked like a charm!

Ed Blankenship

Usually before checking in to TFS Version Control, I will navigate to the pending changes window and compare/diff with the latest version to see what changes I have made.  It’s a good habit to go through just to make sure you aren’t checking anything in that you don’t intend to be committed.

I’ve just been doing it the long way every time by choosing the option from the context menu.

A client asked if there was a quicker way and I ended up finding out that there are two undocumented features to diff the files in the pending changes window:

• Shift + Double-Click on the Item
• Shift + Enter on the Item

Updated – (7/1/2010 11:45 AM)

You can use a registry key to even swap the view/diff behavior in the Pending Changes tool window.  Setting this registry key will make double-click/enter run compare, and shift+double-click/enter view the file.

• Path:     HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<ver>\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior
• <ver> = 10.0 for Visual Studio 2010 & Team Foundation Server 2010
• <ver> = 9.0 for Visual Studio 2008 & Team Foundation Server 2008
• <ver> = 8.0 for Visual Studio 2005 & Team Foundation Server 2005
• Value:   DoubleClickOnChange (DWORD)
• 0 for view as the primary command (default)
• 1 for compare as primary command

How about that?

Ed Blankenship

Many years ago, I really thought the fact that SQL used itself to manage itself was pretty cool (i.e. master database.)  For the past several years, I have been doing something pretty similar and someone just reminded me that it was an interesting concept.  I use TFS to manage the artifacts needed to manage TFS.

TFS Team Project

The first thing I end up doing is creating a team project usually named “TFS” to hold all of the artifacts.  I personally only give the TFS Administrator permissions to the project.  As you’ll see, there may be security sensitive content that may be stored in this team project.  From time to time, other developers may help out with some of the custom tools that can be created to extend TFS.  I’ll create special team project security groups and permissions to those security groups for those particular scenarios.

Reporting Service Encryption Key Backup

After I have setup the TFS team project, the first thing I check-in is the backup of the encryption key from SQL Reporting Services.  It’s extremely important for disaster recovery scenarios that you have a backup of the key since the encrypted contents of SQL Reporting Services won’t be recovered if you don’t have the key.  By checking the key file into version control, you can always make sure you’ll have it backed up with the regular SQL backup process of the databases.

See for more information:  Back Up the Reporting Services Encryption Key

Process Templates

Managing changes to process templates is one of the main reasons I had originally had the idea of creating a team project to manage TFS artifacts.  I think version control is the perfect place to manage changes to all parts of your process templates, especially work item type definition files.  I even create two branches of the process template folders:  one for the production environment and one for the test environment.  This allows you to manage changes just as you would your software releases.  Work item type definition changes definitely require some testing especially since there are risks in causing issues with certain changes.  (Has anyone ever messed up the warehouse?) :)

Build Process Templates

I keep all of the “golden” copies of build process templates in this team project.  I usually perform my actual development work for build process templates in this team project as well and will usually have some test build definitions to try them out.  You could also easily use your staging or test TFS server for this effort too.

Custom Build Assemblies for Build Controllers

One of the awesome new features for TFS 2010 is the ability to store custom build assemblies (like workflow activities, build tasks, build process parameter custom editors, etc.) in a version control folder that the build controller can notify build agents to monitor to deploy those assemblies to each of the build servers in your build lab.

If you want to deploy a new version of those assemblies, just check in the new version and all of the controllers & agents will use them for the next build they perform.  Pretty awesome if you ask me.  I create a folder in the TFS team project just for this purpose.

Source Code

The TFS team project is usually the main location where I will store source code for all of the different extensibility points for TFS and Visual Studio.  This list of custom tools isn’t exhaustive by any means but should give you some ideas of the type of source code that could be contained in this team project:

• Custom Check-In Policies
• Custom Build Workflow Activities and Build Tasks
• Custom Work Item Controls
• Web Service Event Handlers for TFS Events
• Custom Testing Data Collectors (Diagnostic Data Adapters)
• Migration Utilities and Adapters
• Custom Code Analysis Rules
• Global Code Analysis Spelling Dictionary
• Custom IntelliTrace Event Collectors
• Other Visual Studio or TFS Tools

Builds

As I already mentioned above with testing out build process templates, I have several build definitions in this team project:

• Testing Team Build 2010
• Deploying Process Template Changes to Test & Production TFS Servers (I plan on having more information about this process in a future blog post.)
• Custom Tool Builds

Other

Don’t stop with this list.  If it’s something that helps to manage TFS, feel free to store it in this team project.  Here are a few other examples of the types of artifacts I use this team project for:

• SQL Queries to manage the data tier
• Custom SQL Reporting Services Reports

What other types of things do you think, dear reader, are important to store in this team project for managing TFS?

Ed Blankenship

I’ve been hitting my head against the table today trying to have a nice experience for editing a collection of string values as a custom build process parameter in my TFS 2010 build definition.  The problem comes with what editor is actually used to edit the process parameter at design time.  You can specify a custom editor for any of your custom build process parameters which is really handy but I needed the ability to use editors that were out of the box but still provided a sufficient experience to the end user.

My journey towards a solution…

Attempt 1

I began really wanting to have one build process parameter that had the type of Dictionary<string, string>.  That didn’t work out so well because when I went to edit it in my build definition, I received this editor and the add/remove members buttons.

Attempt 2

I gave up on the Dictionary<T, T> approach and decided that I could handle it by specifying two collections of type Collection<string>.  I also attempted to try List<string> and even a String[] but ended up with this editor that seemed to not like System.String.

Attempt 3

I found Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities.StringList.  It is a custom type that is known to Team Build 2010 and even has a custom editor that is registered to it that shows up.  That editor is Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Controls.WpfStringListEditor.  Works great for me!  Take a look:

Ed Blankenship

Looks like this past weekend Don from Microsoft Learning announced the public availability of the Team Foundation Server 2010 Microsoft certification exam.  I had several people ask about what happened to the Beta exam for 70-512 and the only thing I can see is that it was released directly to the public without a Beta phase.

If you pass this exam, you will receive the Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist certification for TFS 2010.  Officially it will indicate:
MCTS: Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server, Administration

I’ll be taking the exam this weekend so I’ll let everyone know how it goes.  Well… as much as I can!  Exam candidates agree not to disclose details about the exam when they take it.

There aren’t any preparation materials available just yet as listed on the Exam Details site.  It does however list the topics that are covered on the exam:

About this Exam

This exam is designed to test the candidate's knowledge and skills on installing, configuring and maintaining Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server.

Audience Profile

This exam is intended for candidates who install, configure, and manage a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 implementation. Candidates typically work in an enterprise development organization that provides process automation services by using TFS.

The qualified candidate has:

• a solid understanding of the TFS architecture and components.
• experience installing and configuring a TFS in both single-server and multi-server configurations.
• experience managing security for TFS components.
• experience configuring and using Team Build.
• experience adapting process templates to an organization.
• experience managing project artifacts with TFS version control.
• experience configuring and using work item tracking.

Skills Being Measured

This exam measures your ability to accomplish the technical tasks listed below.The percentages indicate the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam.

Installing and Configuring TFS (27%)

• Install TFS.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: SQL Server version support, installing TFS in a multi-tier or multi-machine environment, installing TFS in a load-balanced environment, setting up version control proxy

• Configure application tier

  This objective may include but is not limited to: validating an installation, configuring SMTP for TFS, changing the URL (friendly name), changing the default SharePoint Web application, setting up reporting (SQL Server Analysis Services)

• Migrate and upgrade TFS.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: upgrading TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 to TFS 2010, importing a source base from Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS), a third-party revision control system, or a sub-version

• Install and configure team lab.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: set up environment templates, installing and configuring test agents, installing and configuring Virtual Machine Manager (basic Virtual Machine Manager installation), creating library shares or resource pools

• Install and configure multiple build agents and controllers.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: tagging, binding a controller to a project collection, adding as build agent

Managing TFS (27%)

• Manage Team Project Collections.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: moving project collections, managing team collections and projects, creating and configuring team project collections, moving team projects from one collection to another, creating a team project with SharePoint and SQL Server Reporting Services, cloning (splitting team project collections, partitioning)

• Configure for backup and recovery. 

  This objective may include but is not limited to: backup and recovery of TFS and related components, recover a failed application tier, recover a failed database tier, implement a disaster recovery plan

• Monitor server health and performance.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: application tier logs, monitoring the server for performance issues (monitoring activity logging database and TFS server manager), monitoring job infrastructure for failed jobs (monitoring warehouse adapters and warehouse jobs), cleanup of stale workspaces and shelvesets, cleanup builds (applying retention policies), setting up team build to use a version control proxy server

• Administer TFS application tier.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: retiring or archiving projects and purging the system, rebuilding a warehouse, configuring user permissions by using Active Directory Domain Services  and TFS groups, moving a TFS instance to a new server or a new domain, configuring security for TFS Work Item Only View

• Manage reporting for TFS.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: basic reporting using Microsoft Office Excel Services, adding a custom report to a SharePoint project portal, uploading a new SQL Server Reporting Services TFS report, configuring to enable a report to appear in a SharePoint project portal

• Set up automated functional and UI tests.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: setting up a build definition, configuring the build definition to use the proper lab environment, setting up tests to work on an installed agent, setting up a service as interactive, setting up data collectors

Customizing TFS for Team Use (24%)

• Configure a team build definition.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: setting up for a Symbol Server and Source Server, setting up for test impact analysis, setting up for custom build numbers, configuring build log verbosity, setting up for code analysis, setting up for automated unit testing, setting up for architecture validation

• Configure and execute a build. 

  This objective may include but is not limited to: queuing a build with parameters, reconciling workspaces as part of a gated check-in workflow, setting up build triggers (gated check-in, continuous integration, scheduled build)

• Modify a process template.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: customizing a process template by changing the workflow for a work item, adding a new work item type as a child of an existing work item (WI), uploading and downloading process templates

• Configure a team project.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: areas and iterations, default security groups, portal settings (team project portal site URL, process guidance URL)

• Apply work item customizations.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: link types, Global list, creating a new WI category and adding existing WI types to the new category, adding or removing fields, transitions, queries, customizing a workflow, creating or editing a work item type, importing and exporting work item types, renaming work item types

• Create Work Item Query Language (WIQL) queries.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: query folders and permissions, query types (tree, flat, directed), defining WIQL keywords, adding fields to a query, creating a WIQL query by using Team Explorer, identify built-in macros

• Configure client connectivity to TFS.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: configuring Visual Studio, Team Explorer, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, and other tools to connect to TFS, configuring clients for proxy server

Administering Version Control (23%)

• Create and manage workspaces.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: cloaking, undo delete, modifying a workspace, deleting a workspace, specifying the workspace visibility, restoring deleted items, unlocking other users’ checkouts, pending changes, and code

• Configure shelvesets. 

  This objective may include but is not limited to: private builds, creating a shelveset, deleting a shelveset, opening another user’s shelveset

• Branch and merge source artifacts.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: track change visualizations, converting a folder into a proper branch and creating a new branch, merging and resolving file conflicts, viewing branch hierarchy, creating a branch, deleting a branch

• Configure version control proxy.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: cache hit ratio, setting up the cache size, setting up for multiple TFS servers

• Configure team project version control settings.

  This objective may include but is not limited to: enable multiple checkout, enable get latest on checkout, configuring check-in policies for a team project (work items, builds, code analysis, testing policies)

Good luck!  Let me know how you end up doing on the exam.

Ed Blankenship

During the first week of April, a little package was sitting on my front porch with the first book to be released on the Visual Studio 2010 release that deals with the new Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) features.  For those of you who don’t know, this essentially means the former “Team System” line of products as we were exposed to it in the 2005 and 2008 releases.  Although the entire Visual Studio suite of products is considered something that helps you with ALM, the book primarily focused on Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 Premium, Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional, Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, and Team Foundation Server 2010.  During the Introduction, I even appreciated how the authors discussed about “where Team System went.”  It’s the best explanation of the branding change that I’ve seen to date.

I was extremely excited to start immediately reading the book.  Even though I have been closely involved with the 2010 release as a Microsoft MVP, when I started to read this book my goal was to be exposed deeper in the feature set being introduced in the 2010 release.

At the time of writing this blog post, the book was selling for $34.64 at Amazon.  The suggested retail price is $54.99.  It is currently #7 in the Software Development books category!

Strengths

If you are new to the ALM features in Visual Studio, I felt this book really offered you the ability to get the high-level overview of all of those features.  It’s essentially similar to a “survey” course that you would have taken in college.   It’s 696 pages that ends up going through all of the Visual Studio client and server features at just the right level of detail. There were even some areas that I felt that I learned more about and hadn’t been exposed to heavily in the past.

The architecture features were something that I had hoped to learn the most from.  They have just never been something that I dived into great detail during the 2010 release cycle.   All of the new UML diagrams that are available including the new architecture features like Use Case, Activity, Sequence, Component, Class, Dependency, and Layer Diagrams.  There was a also a great introduction to the Architecture Explorer.

The testing features have really been what has made up a majority of the Visual Studio 2010 release and the book definitely reflects that.  Going through the testing features, I really felt like I understood the end to end story.  It felt very rounded out!  These chapters are where I picked up a majority of the nuggets of information.  I can’t tell you how many times I said “wow, I didn’t know you could do that.”  I also feel like this is a great place to pick up some introductory knowledge about how Visual Studio Team Lab Management fits into the ALM story.  I also kept thinking how great this book would be for the testers on your team that are new to the Microsoft testing platform and Team Foundation Server.

There are so many changes to TFS, I can’t even begin to start describing them.  Thankfully, the book did a great job.  Especially with the revamp of Team Build to use Windows Workflow Foundation.  You can even download the Team Build chapter from the book for free here:  Team Foundation Build.  Other than automated builds, you’ll get a good pass by all of the rest of the new TFS 2010 features and architecture/topology changes.

There was a whole chapter dedicated to debugging with IntelliTrace!  That’s awesome.  I’m very much a fan of IntelliTrace and think that will truly change the way you develop.

Criticisms

I have been hoping to have a book available out there that really only discusses TFS.  The book definitely has a few chapters available on TFS and spends a good amount of time but that discussion is not the nitty gritty that I think some readers out there are really looking for.  With that said, I don’t think this book was positioned for the “TFS Administrator” exclusively.  Again, I really think this is a survey-level review of the entire ALM stack of features for Visual Studio.  That doesn’t allow you to go into the depths of any particular product.  There currently isn’t a book available for TFS 2010 with the level of detail that I am sure some readers out there are hoping for.  We’ll see what happens in the months to come…

My next criticism isn’t so much for the content of the book as what is media choices are available.  I own a Kindle DX and I imagine a few other techies in the world have some type of eBook reader as well.  I was hoping to have a CD that contained a DRM-free PDF that I could copy over to my Kindle DX whenever I’m traveling and need a quick resource for reference.  Wrox certainly does allow you to get a PDF of books but you have to order them separately even if you had purchased the hard copy.

Finally, the only other thing that I noticed was in that chapter about IntelliTrace (see above) there wasn’t a mention of Symbol & Source Server.  I couldn’t believe it.  There is definitely a discussion later in the book about Team Build’s integration with Symbol & Source server but I was hoping to have seen some more detail in the IntelliTrace chapter about the importance of having them setup for your organization.  You’ll want to put two and two together.

Now that I’m finished scrounging from the bottom of the barrel to find some criticisms… :)

My Recommendation

Hands down, get this book.  I think it’s well worth it.   I know each of the authors and it really looks like they put a tremendous amount of effort into writing the book.  The topics are really presented well and at the right level of detail for someone really wanting a crash course in all of the Visual Studio ALM features.  I can’t even tell you how many new nuggets of information that I ran across of things that I didn’t even realize were in the product.

It certainly gets my stamp of approval! :)  Kudos to the authors.

Very respectfully,

Ed Blankenship

Microsoft MVP of the Year, Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server

That answer is a resoundingly yes, in my opinion, and I believe you would find some real value in having your UAT testers using Microsoft Test Manager to perform those UAT tests.  However, I think the real question that should be asked is do you have to purchase a license for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional to use Microsoft Test Manager to perform those User Acceptance Tests (UAT?)

Background

What are you talking about, Ed? 

There is a licensing exclusion that exists that really helps out when business users connect to development/test environments to perform user acceptance testing.  This exclusion really kicks in and helps when those development/test servers have used Operating Systems, SQL  Server, etc. licenses that conform to the MSDN EULA.  The exclusion basically says those non-technical business users don’t require an MSDN subscription to connect to those development/test servers if they are only performing user acceptance tests.  Normally, each person who connects to a development/test environment that has MSDN software installed on it (like the OS) requires that each of them has an active MSDN subscription.

Here’s the full description directly from the Visual Studio 2010 Licensing Whitepaper:

User Acceptance Testing

At the end of a software development project, end users (or team members acting as proxies for end users) typically review an application and determine whether it meets the necessary criteria for release—a process sometimes called user acceptance testing or UAT. MSDN software may be accessed by end users who do not have MSDN subscriptions for purposes of acceptance testing, provided that the use of the software otherwise complies with all MSDN licensing terms.

Under MSDN subscription licenses, user acceptance testing must not use live production data. If a copy of any live production data is used, then that copy of the data must be discarded after the testing is complete and cannot be incorporated back into the live production data.

So back to the real question…

Do you have to purchase a license to use Microsoft Test Manager to perform UAT?

Well that’s the question that a client brought up.  Did they have to purchase a license of at least Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional for those business users if they wanted to use Microsoft Test Manager to perform the UAT tests?

Microsoft’s answer is:  Yes

The fact that you are using Microsoft Test Manager, in their opinion, is that you are doing more technical & formalized testing than what they would consider to be in the UAT licensing exclusion for MSDN software.

Ed Blankenship

One of the announcements made yesterday was the new product Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010!  If you are not familiar with the former Teamprise products that were purchased late last year by Microsoft, this new product is essentially the Microsoft branded version of Team Explorer that works inside most Eclipse-based IDEs.

You can download this new product from the Microsoft Downloads site or from  MSDN Subscriber Downloads.  There is even a new forum dedicated on the MSDN Forums site.

If you are curious about this product, be sure to follow Martin Woodward’s blog site for more information.  Martin Woodward is now the Program Manager on the TFS Product Team who works with this line of tools.

Ed Blankenship

One of the really great things about the Visual Studio 2010 installers is the fact that Team Explorer is installed with all of the Visual Studio editions (except Express.)  This even includes Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional.  In previous versions of Visual Studio, you would have to install Team Explorer additionally after you installed Visual Studio.  Thankfully those days are long past us…

However, if you do have users that only need the functionality of Team Explorer 2010 (like the add-ins and integration for Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Project) then you can download them separately either from MSDN Subscriber Downloads or from the Microsoft Downloads site. 

Just a reminder, you can download Team Explorer 2010 for free but you still need to make sure that each user has a TFS 2010 CAL (unless they meet certain exclusions.)   If you purchased Visual Studio 2010 with a full MSDN subscription then you already receive a TFS 2010 CAL included.   The complimentary MSDN Essentials subscription that is included with Visual Studio 2010 Professional does not include a TFS 2010 CAL though.

Ed Blankenship

Even more important news… is that Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4,  and Team Foundation Server 2010 are being launched today!  It’s been a really long time coming but super excited that this day is here.

You can watch the launch event live from Las Vegas here. I believe the coverage will start at 8:30 AM (PDT) / 12:30 PM (EDT.)

Trial downloads should be available sometime today at the Visual Studio 2010 Marketing Site.  MSDN Subscribers will be able to download the CDs for Visual Studio and TFS later today starting at 10:00 (PDT) / 2:00 PM (EDT.)  I doubt that Volume Licensing customers will be able to download the 2010 CDs today from the Volume Licensing Center.  It may take some time before it is available through the VL channel.  If you are unable to get the media through MSDN, you can always download the trial CDs today and then apply the product key later on when you get it from MSDN or the Volume Licensing site.  It doesn’t require you to uninstall and reinstall.  You can just activate your trial copy!

• In Visual Studio 2010, go to Help –> Register Product
• In Team Foundation Server 2010 Administration Console, click the root node in the navigation pane and then click Update License.

Happy Launch Day!

Ed Blankenship

In other news today… Imaginet Resources Corp has announced that they will be acquiringNotion Solutions.  Branding has even been updated on the Notion website already:

I have been working with the ALM folks over at Imaginet for a few years now including their co-founder Joel Semeniuk who is also an MVP in Visual Studio ALM (Team System) and a Microsoft Regional Director.  They’re a good group and definitely looking forward to working with them closely after the acquisition.  The Imaginet folks are also the ones who have been doing the software development effort around the freely available tools for TFS (Work Item Manager, Project Dashboard) and newly available TeamPulse.

The launch of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 is just around the corner and I’m starting to hear this question quite a bit:  Which edition of Visual Studio 2010 do I need to buy for my team members?  My usual attempt at humor  would be responding with the question “How much money do you have?” but that doesn’t usually go very well for those with tight budgets. 

The first thing I want to say before we move any further in this discussion is:

• The first rule of buying any type of Microsoft license is don’t buy retail if you don’t have to.  Say that a few times to yourself.  There are so many different volume licensing programs available that would end up working well for your team and organization size.  Do a little work and phone up your local Microsoft Sales representative to see about your options.  You’ll find that you could save a ton of money and most of them that I have worked with on behalf of my clients are willing to work out what’s best for you and your budget.  Give it a try – it’s really not difficult and could save your team quite a bit of money.

Earlier this year, the suggested retail prices were announced for each of the Visual Studio 2010 editions.  This should be a baseline of how to relatively compare the prices between each edition; not that you would ever pay retail prices right?

The Editions

Thankfully, we don’t have all of the editions that we had in the 2008 and 2005 releases.  In the 2010 release, there are essentially now three editions plus a new edition for generalist/non-technical testers.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional

I won’t spend time talking about which features are available in each edition and how to compare them because I believe the Microsoft Visual Studio marketing site is doing a really great job with the high-level overview.

Personal aside/opinion:  I believe IntelliTrace, alone, is worth the cost of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for you junior/senior developers.  I’m talking about both the local debugging scenario and the ability for testers to gather IntelliTrace logs while testing and then opening those up to troubleshoot a bug.  Both scenarios have been extremely valuable to me personally when I have both my developer & tester hats on.  I do understand that it takes some work getting the latter scenario to work correctly (symbol server, source server,  TFS builds, etc.)  and also takes some effort around getting developers to actually learn how to use it well but it’s totally worth it in the long run.  Don’t hesitate to find some help from an excellent Microsoft Partner specializing in the Visual Studio ALM products, like Notion Solutions, if you want some assistance getting your developers/testers trained and setting up all of the nuts & bolts to get everything working.  (Shameless plug, I know, but what can I say?)

MSDN

Seriously, just be sure to get the MSDN Professional subscription included when you purchase your Visual Studio licenses.  (More information about MSDN Subscriptions)

Not only that, make sure your IT department (officially, the volume licensing administrator at your organization) gives all of your team members the “benefit access number” so that each team member can register for the MSDN benefits.  I can’t believe how many IT organizations don’t want their team members to access their benefits because “they might download the software at home” or heaven forbid “install it on their machines themselves.”  Come on…  You can tell I’ve heard several excuses.

Some of the new benefits of an MSDN Professional subscription are now that you receive priority forums support in addition to the included technical support calls, a real TFS 2010 CAL and a real TFS 2010 production license among many of the other benefits.

Scenario-Based Purchase Decisions

Microsoft did a good job reducing the number of editions but for some reason I’m still getting the question about what to purchase.  That tells me that people are still confused about deciding what’s appropriate for each team member especially when they have to consider the cost difference.  (Aside:  BTW, comparable ALM products on the market are SO much more expensive for what they deliver.)

More than likely, you are going to want to look at what scenarios you want to enable for your team.  Earlier this week, some colleagues at work and I were able to put together this presentation that goes through the different scenarios that I think most people would be interested in taking advantage of when adopting Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010.  You can look at each individual scenario and it will point out what you need to purchase for the different roles on your team.  After each of the individual scenarios are mentioned, you can even start to look at the most common combinations and see what that looks like.  Of course, I couldn’t go through every combination but if you don’t see one, post a comment.

Final Thoughts

I hope that you were able to get some information to help you make a better purchase decision.  Any suggestions?  I’ll be happy to update this blog post or the PowerPoint deck from time to time with those suggestions or other common combination requests.  Just leave me a comment below!

Take care,

Ed Blankenship

Just got exposed to a great table about what features are available in Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 for unmanaged code (C++.)  Thanks to Anna Russo for sharing!  Anyone know the source of this information?

Ed Blankenship

A lot of people have been asking about whether the new Coded UI automated testing & Microsoft Test Manager test runner features would support Silverlight and I haven’t really had a good answer for them other than “not at 2010 RTM.”  There’s been a ton of reasons why that wasn’t the case but thankfully we received a little more information about timeline for that type of support.  We were also able to make this information available publicly so check out the raw info coming in below.  Notice my particular emphasis added around the release mechanism that was mentioned.

Whenever we talk about platform coverage for UI automation one of the frequent requests is support for Silverlight app testing. We have been hard at work trying to cater to this need and I wanted to update you all on where we are with this effort and provide a roadmap.

We are working on adding support for Silverlight controls for “Fast forward for manual testing” and “Coded UI Tests”. The focus is on line-of-business applications built with Silverlight 4 for both in-browser and on the desktop. The initial investigation is in progress and we are working with the Silverlight team to close on the overall design. We are planning to release a CTP version of a plug-in by Q2CY2010. This will be delivered out of band to active MSDN subscribers (Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio Ultimate) customers only. […]

- Ram Cherala, Visual Studio Team Test Product Team

Make sure you have active MSDN subscriptions if you want to get out of band value from the product teams.  Anyone have any questions?

Ed Blankenship

Once of the nice things about having moved to Charleston, SC is being relatively around the corner from half of the Team Foundation Server team in Raleigh, North Carolina. I get plenty of opportunities to talk with the TFS product team in Redmond, WA but rarely get the opportunity to talk with the side that’s in Raleigh. It’s good being close now.

Yesterday, I had the privilege and honor of talking at the TFS Product Team’s All Hands meeting at the Microsoft Office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Each quarter, the entire team split between Redmond, WA and Raleigh, NC get together to talk about different topics to review the last quarter and looking forward to the future about work they want to do. It’s very similar to some “All Hands” meetings that each of our companies put together. They have had a tradition in the past to invite a customer in to talk about how they have used TFS in their daily work and I imagine that gives the entire team some insight into how people outside of Microsoft are actually using the products they spend every day creating. I was invited to be that customer for this quarter.

They also really like for you to spend some time talking about what your feature requests are for the product. I had the opportunity to discuss some of my personal areas that I’d like to see some investment made. Normally when going to events like the Microsoft MVP Summit or providing other private feedback, I take the approach of being objective and provide feedback on behalf of the people I took to and the customers that I help. I rarely bring up anything that I personally would like to see since some of the things I want are things that most people would never even touch or appreciate. However, this was my one time that I didn’t feel bad about being totally subjective and asking for my personal feature desires :)

I also had some time to spend talking with the Build team and Version Control team about problems areas that I think people will run into when TFS 2010 launches next month as well as discussing some of those things that some people really hate about TFS version control. You know who you are on Twitter :) It was a really great conversation about the problem scenarios really are that people face before arriving to frustration with the product.

I’ve said this before but I really admire and appreciate the team for the amount of effort they put into listening and acting on feedback. I promise and can tell you that they’re listening. There are plenty of features and changes even coming out in TFS 2010 that were things that I know that one of the MVPs, customers, or I had originally suggested. That means they’re not only listening but they are doing something about it.

Anyhow, it was a very productive day and really enjoyed the time. I’m so glad to be an MVP that is tied to such a great product group.

Ed Blankenship

I’m up early working on a problem that’s been nagging me and just had to stop for a second to show how friggin’ awesome the new Branching & Track Changes visualization tools in TFS 2010 are.  This is on a demo TFS 2010 environment but I wanted to use the APIs to find out information about what changesets were included in a merged changeset.  I needed to find a good candidate that allowed me to follow some changes throughout the branches.  I quickly found changeset 103 in my MAIN branch which included several (but not too many) individual changesets that were included with it.  I went ahead and tracked that changeset and got the following diagram below.

However, I noticed that I ended up having some kind of partial merge as indicated in the Feature A branch with changeset 78 (as indicated by the yellow shading on the track changes visualization.)  That got me curious… What happened there?  It was pretty easy to figure out because all I had to do is change to the “Timeline View” instead of the “Hierarchy View” that I was currently in and I ended up receiving the visualization below which shed some light on things.

The reason the Feature A branch was indicated as a partial merge was because not all of the changes that are included in changeset 103 (which is the changeset we’re pivoting off of for visualizations) has been merged into that branch.  It only contains changesets 76 & 77 but not 101 & 102.  Pretty handy!

Ed Blankenship

Dependency management can be tough.  One way you can help visualize dependencies is by using the new Predecessor & Successor link type in TFS 2010 Work Item Tracking.  The way this particular link type works is that it is of type “Dependency” topology.  Here’s some more information about the Dependency topology:

Link types of this topology are like Directed Network links in that they have directionality, but an additional constraint to prevent circular relationships.

Example XML:

                 1:
                <
                LinkTypes
                >
              

                 2:
                <
                LinkType
                ReferenceName
                ="MyLinks.LinkTypes.MyPred"
                ForwardName
                ="My
Successor"
                ReverseName
                ="My
Predecessor"
                Topology
                ="Dependency"
                />
              

                 3:
                </
                LinkTypes
                >
              

You can list the link types currently on your TFS server by using the following command at a Visual Studio command prompt:

witadmin listlinktypes /collection:http://YourTfsServerName:8080/tfs/YourTeamProjectCollectionName

The details about the dependency link type that we’re interested as listed from witadmin.exe is:

Reference Name: System.LinkTypes.Dependency
Names: Successor, Predecessor
Topology: Dependency
Is Active: True

Gregg Boer has some more great information about customizing link types in TFS 2010 available here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/greggboer/archive/2010/03/01/tfs-2010-customizing-work-item-link-types.aspx

Adding a Dependencies Tab on the Work Item Form Layout

If you would like to add a tab in the layout for the work item type definition, you can add the following XML segment to the WITD Layout Section:

               1:
              <
              Tab
              Label
              ="Dependencies"
              >
            

               2:
              <
              Control
              Type
              ="LinksControl"
              Label
              ="Dependencies
Information for this Bug:"
              LabelPosition
              ="Top"
              Name
              ="Dependencies"
              >
            

               3:
              <
              LinksControlOptions
              >
            

               4:
              <
              LinkColumns
              >
            

               5:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="System.Id"
              />
            

               6:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="System.WorkItemType"
              />
            

               7:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="System.Title"
              />
            

               8:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="System.AssignedTo"
              />
            

               9:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="System.State"
              />
            

               10:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.OriginalEstimate"
              />
            

               11:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.RemainingWork"
              />
            

               12:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.CompletedWork"
              />
            

               13:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.StartDate"
              />
            

               14:
              <
              LinkColumn
              RefName
              ="Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.FinishDate"
              />
            

               15:
              <
              LinkColumn
              LinkAttribute
              ="System.Links.Comment"
              />
            

               16:
              </
              LinkColumns
              >
            

               17:
              <
              WorkItemLinkFilters
              FilterType
              ="include"
              >
            

               18:
              <
              Filter
              LinkType
              ="System.LinkTypes.Dependency"
              />
            

               19:
              </
              WorkItemLinkFilters
              >
            

               20:
              <
              ExternalLinkFilters
              FilterType
              ="excludeAll"
              />
            

               21:
              <
              WorkItemTypeFilters
              FilterType
              ="includeAll"
              />
            

               22:
              </
              LinksControlOptions
              >
            

               23:
              </
              Control
              >
            

               24:
              </
              Tab
              >
            

It will then show up on your work items something like this:

New Links Control Options

The LinksControl work item control has always existed but now that we have link types in TFS 2010, you can specify multiple links controls in the layout but have them specify certain filters.  Notice the User Story/Requirement, Test Case, and Bug in the MSF Agile and MSF CMMI process templates all take advantage of specifying multiple links controls.

There is more very early information about the new options of this control here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/08/20/rosario-filtering-link-types-on-a-work-item-form.aspx

Dependencies Integration with Microsoft Office Project

One of the benefits of using the built-in Predecessor/Successor link type is that if you are pulling your work items into Microsoft Office Project, you end up seeing those dependencies in the project plan.  You can even change the dependencies in Project and publish your changes back to the TFS where they’ll show up on the new Dependencies tab you just created.  They are essentially round-tripped between Project and TFS 2010.

More Resources

• Customizing Work Item Types in TFS 2010
• Filtering Links Types on a Work Item
• Customizing Work Item Link Types in TFS 2010

Take care,

Ed Blankenship

I’ve had a few questions about the missing Alerts Editor node in Team Explorer after installing the TFS 2010 RC Power Tools so I thought I’d share with everyone.  First, Alerts Editor has been renamed to Alerts Explorer in the TFS 2010 Power Tools release.  Next, you’ll notice that in the TFS 2008 Power Tools, that a node existed underneath each Team Project shown below.

You’ll see that in the TFS 2010 Power Tools, it’s no longer available as a node under each team project but rather available from the context menu of the Team Project Collection node and named “Alerts Explorer.”

What is the Alerts Explorer?

There is a rich eventing & alerting system in TFS that allows end users to self-subscribe to alerts that meet different criteria.  These alerts can either be e-mail alerts or SOAP-based alerts to a web service URL.  (SOAP subscriptions can only be created by Team Foundation Server Administrators.)  By opening up the Alerts Explorer, you can see any of the subscriptions that you currently have created on the server.

Also, you can create new alerts based on some out of the box templates like “Work Items Assigned to Me” or “Failed Builds.”  This is a good starting off point for creating alerts and allows you to further customize the filter criteria to your specifications.

Tip:  As shown in the screenshot above, if you don’t want to receive an e-mail alert whenever you actually change something, be sure to include the “Authorized As <> Your Name” clause.

You also get some handy context menus around the Team Explorer UI to help you to easily create subscriptions.  For example, if there is a particular work item (like a bug) that you want to get e-mail alerts anytime someone changes it, just choose “Alert on Change..” from the context menu on that work item.  You’ll find some other context menu items for Alerts in other places so have fun finding them!

Ed Blankenship

One of the most exciting parts of last week’s Microsoft MVP Global Summit was the surprise announcement that I was chosen as the MVP of the Year for Visual Studio Team System (Visual Studio ALM now) and TFS. I can’t tell you how humbled I was to find out! One of the special parts of this particular award is that each of the Visual Studio ALM MVPs nominated our peers for the award. We have an exceptionally great group and to have been chosen from this great group is the most humbling part. Thanks to each and every one of you for this honor!

Martin Woodward was selected as the MVP of the Year last year so I hear we’re going to start the tradition of passing on the “MVP of the Year” belt buckle :) That should be fun to hold on to for 2010.

(Thanks to Sunder Raman for taking the picture!)

One of the exciting “features” of the award was an invitation to a dinner with Soma Somasegar, Brian Harry, Scott Hanselman, Brad Abrams, Chuck, Sara Ford, and the other top-notch MVPs selected from the other Developer Division MVP groups. It was truly a great dinner and we had a lot of great conversation. Ewald Hofman (another VSTS MVP) also joined us for the awesome amount of contributions to the VSTS MSDN Forums.

Thanks again to everyone for the awesome honor!

Very respectfully,

Ed Blankenship

Just got some news about Team Lab Management in TFS 2010 hot off the press:

Q: How will support work for customers who are already using Lab Management with the Go-Live License in Beta 2 or RC?

A: We will continue to support customers that have already gone live with Lab Management 2010 pre-release go-live licenses.

 

Q: What are the pricing details for Lab Management 2010?

A: Suggested FPP retail price for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is US$1599. Of course, the majority of customers are likely to qualify for a lower price point based on volume licensing discounts. Lab Management 2010 will be priced per physical processor (each processor of each lab server must be licensed for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010). Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is required to manage lab environments.

 

Q: Have we changed our shipping plans for the general availability of Lab Management 2010?

A: Quality has always been and remains a top priority for Visual Studio. Being definitive about RTM dates is always very difficult and doubly so for brand new v1 products. For this reason, until we are very close, we generally only forecast release timeframes rather than specific dates. While it’s true, early on, we had hoped to release the new Lab Management product at the same time as the rest of Visual Studio 2010. It became clear through the Beta cycle that it was taking a bit longer to get sufficient, detailed feedback. Excitement has been very high but there’s also a huge amount of new value in the 2010 wave; we made the decision that it was better for Lab Management to ship a little later in the 2010 wave if that means we can incorporate additional feedback to ensure it’s the terrific product everyone wants it to be. 

 

Remember, customers can deploy it with a supported pre-release go-live license!   If customers have any feedback during the pre-release process, please send that to the product group using Microsoft Connect.

 

About Visual Studio Lab Management 2010

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is a new offering in the Visual Studio 2010 release wave. Lab Management 2010 enables teams to configure and manage a virtual lab environment. Lab Management works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager for enabling teams to create environment templates, provision ring-fenced environments, and checkpoint those environments. Using Lab Management, you can accelerate setup, tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for test execution and build automation. It extends build automation by automating virtual machine provisioning, build deployment and build verification in an integrated manner. It also enables testers to file rich bugs with links to environment checkpoints that developers can use to recreate complex environments, effectively reducing wasted time and resources in your development and test life cycle. Those checkpoints can be attached to bugs filed using the Microsoft Test Manager enabling the person fixing the bug to open the environment right to the appropriate point in the application flow.

 

Related Links

· Visual Studio Lab Management Team Blog

· Visual Studio Team Test Blog

· Microsoft Virtualization VHD Test Drive Program

Ed Blankenship

The Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 was made available a few days to MSDN Subscribers.  It’s now going to be made available to the rest of the world today:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151797

The first impression I have is that Visual Studio has been super super snappy and lot more purple :)  You can really take advantage of all of the performance work that has been performed by the product groups.  What’s funny is that I have was too slow several times to grab the screenshot below! :)

I have also done several TFS 2010 Beta 2 to RC upgrades so far and all of them have gone super well including a super complex setup that we have at Notion Solutions.  If you are planning on upgrading from Beta 2 to RC, be sure to read the Upgrade Guide before you get started.

As with the Beta 2, the RC of TFS, Visual Studio, and .NET Framework 4 can be used in production with a “Go-Live” license.  Be sure to check out Jeff Beehler’s blog post that has more information about the “Go-Live” license including how to register for complimentary support in case you need it.

After you get everything installed and used it for a few days, please be sure to give feedback about whether you think the release is ready to go by taking the RC survey.  There is only a limited time to give any feedback and the bar is high for things that will change before RTM so don’t delay!

Ed Blankenship

One of the new features for TFS 2010 Version Control is the ability to rollback or undo a changeset or check-in inside the product and see it as a new pending change type (and new change type in the history) inside Team Explorer.  This feature has been available in TFS 2008 but you had to use the TFS Power Tools.  The only gotcha for the TFS 2010 implementation is that you have to use the command-line application tf.exe to actually perform the rollback information.  More information about the tool is available here in the MSDN Library:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd380776(VS.100).aspx

The syntax is:

tf rollback /changeset:changesetfrom~changesetto [itemspec] [/recursive]
            [/lock:none|checkin|checkout] [/version:versionspec]
            [/keepmergehistory] [/noprompt] [/login:username,[password]]

tf rollback /toversion:versionspec itemspec [/recursive]
            [/lock:none|checkin|checkout] [/version:versionspec]
            [/keepmergehistory] [/noprompt] [/login:username,[password]]

Versionspec:
    Date/Time         D"any .Net Framework-supported format"
                      or any of the date formats of the local machine
    Changeset number  Cnnnnnn
    Label             Llabelname
    Latest version    T
    Workspace         Wworkspacename;workspaceowner

Ed Blankenship

Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting in this month’s geekSpeak about migrating from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server 2010.  I’m sure we’ll get through the VSS content pretty quickly so with the time left we’ll talk about new branching & merging features, branch visualization, and gated check-in.

In this geekSpeak, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Ed Blankenship discusses migrating source code from Visual SourceSafe, including the history. There has not been a better time to migrate to the newest Microsoft source control offering, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server, because Microsoft Visual SourceSafe support is ending soon and Team Foundation Server will be part of Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscriptions in 2010. Ed discusses specific version-control features to help you become more productive like branching and merging visualization, annotate, shelving, and gated check-in. This geekSpeak is hosted by Glen Gordon and Brian Hitney.

Registration for the event available here:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032438525

BTW – The end-of-life support date for Visual SourceSafe is mid-year 2011.  Don’t get stuck on an unsupported product :) especially one that’s holding your source code!

Update :  The recording of this presentation is now available on Channel 9 here:  http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/geekSpeak/geekSpeak-Recording-Migrating-to-Team-Foundation-Server-from-Visual-SourceSafe/ .  Sorry about the dropped call in the middle of the presentation.  Also, here’s some links that I mentioned during the talk:

• Whitepaper – “From VSS to TFS”:  http://sstjean.blogspot.com/2006/10/document-from-vss-to-tfs-introduction.html
• Whitepaper – Exposing TFS to the Internet:  http://blogs.msdn.com/ablock/archive/2009/08/24/exposing-tfs-2010-beta-2-to-the-internet.aspx
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Training Kit (Labs, Videos, Slide Decks, etc.): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en

Ed Blankenship

I'm pleased to announce that we now have pricing information that is publicly available for the Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 products!  Remember, these are Retail prices and if you are in a company you should never be paying retail :)  Always talk to your Microsoft Sales team and ask for volume licensing deals.

Also, if you didn’t hear, a production license for TFS 2010 and a TFS 2010 CAL is included with every MSDN subscription!

Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010

			With 1-Year MSDN Subscription*
Product	Buy	Upgrade	Buy	Renew
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate	-	-	$11,899	$3,799
Visual Studio 2010 Premium	-	-	$5,469	$2,299
Visual Studio 2010 Professional	$799	$549	$1,199	$799
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010	-	-	$2,169	$899
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010	$499	$399	-	-
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL	$499	-	-	-
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 (1000 Virtual Users)	$4,499	-	-	-

* Subscription contents vary by purchased product.

Ed Blankenship

Thanks to the Visual Studio ALM Rangers, we have a new release of the TFS Branching Guidance!  Think of it like TFS Branching Guidance 3.0… it was developed specifically for TFS 2010 including tidbits on best practices using all of the new branching & merging hierarchy and visualizing change features.

I often talk about branching & merging strategies with my clients and it’s always great to have some diagrams and content to go back to and leave with them so that they can delve into Configuration Management a little more.

Head on over to their CodePlex site:  http://tfsbranchingguideiii.codeplex.com/

Project Description
The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around branching and merging with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. The new release focuses on Hands on Labs and includes lots of lessons learnt from the community Q&A.
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010
Branching and merging of software is a very large topic. It is an area where there is a lot of maturity in the software industry. This Ranger solution focuses on applied and practical examples of branching that you can use right now. The 2010 release includes discussions around branching concepts and strategies but also focuses on practical hands-on labs.
Visual Studio ALM Rangers
This guidance is created by the Rangers who have the mission to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. This content was created with support from Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from the field, where the technology has been tested and used.
What is in the package?
The content is packaged in 8 separate zip files to give you the choice of selective downloads but the default download is the TFS_Branching_Guide_2010_Complete_Package_v1 if you are interested in all parts.

• TFS_Branching_Guide_Main_2010_v1.zip --> Start here
• TFS_Branching_Guide_Scenarios_2010_v1.zip
• TFS_Branching_Guide_Scenarios_2010_Poster_v1.zip
• HOL_Quick_Start_Basic_Branch_Plan_2010_v1.zip
• Lab_Files_HOL_Quick_Start_Basic_Branch_Plan_v1.zip
• TFS_Branching_Guide_Q&A_2010_v1.zip
• TFS_Branching_Guide_Diagrams_2010_v1.zip
• TFS_Branching_Guide_2010_Complete_Package_v1

Team
Bill Heys, James Pickell, Willy-Peter Schaub, Bijan Javidi, Oliver Hilgers, Bob Jacobs, Sin Min Lee, Neno Loje, Mathias Olausson, Matt Velloso
How to submit new ideas?
The recommended method is to simply post ideas to the community or to contact the Rangers at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/ee358786.aspx.

Ed Blankenship

Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting in this month’s geekSpeak about migrating from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server 2010.  I’m sure we’ll get through the VSS content pretty quickly so with the time left we’ll talk about new branching & merging features, branch visualization, and gated check-in.

In this geekSpeak, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Ed Blankenship discusses migrating source code from Visual SourceSafe, including the history. There has not been a better time to migrate to the newest Microsoft source control offering, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server, because Microsoft Visual SourceSafe support is ending soon and Team Foundation Server will be part of Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscriptions in 2010. Ed discusses specific version-control features to help you become more productive like branching and merging visualization, annotate, shelving, and gated check-in. This geekSpeak is hosted by Glen Gordon and Brian Hitney.

Registration for the event available here:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032438525

BTW – The end-of-life support date for Visual SourceSafe is mid-year 2011.  Don’t get stuck on an unsupported product :) especially one that’s holding your source code!

Ed Blankenship

Report Builder is an awesome tool in lieu of using Microsoft Office Excel or Business Intelligence Studio to create custom reports with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.  The version of Report Builder that shipped with SQL Server 2008 is Report Builder 1.0.  Report Builder 2.0 was later released with plenty of new features and a better report writing experience.

The only issue though is that the most discoverable way to install Report Builder using Click-Once is through Report Manager but it points to Report Builder 1.0 even after you install Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008.

If you installed Service Pack 1 for your Reporting Services instance, there is actually a way to change the behavior though to point it to the Report Builder 2.0 Click-Once install.  Click “Site Settings” in the upper-right hand corner and then fill out the Custom Report Builder Launch URL to “/ReportBuilder/ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application” if your server is setup in Native mode (which it should be if it is the RS instance for TFS) or “/_vti_bin/ReportBuilder/ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application” if it is in SharePoint Mode.

Alternately, if you want to download the full MSI installer you can over at Microsoft Downloads:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f783224-9871-4eea-b1d5-f3140a253db6&displaylang=en.  Thanks to the Reporting Services Team Blog for the handy information.

Ed Blankenship

It wasn’t long ago that an original launch date (March 22, 2009) was announced for Team Foundation Server 2010, Visual Studio 2010, and the .NET Framework 4.0.  It then got postponed after the product teams realized that they weren’t going to meet that date and have a solid product up high release standards.  A new launch date has been announced to be April 12, 2010.

Now remember that launch date doesn’t mean release date!  I had a little discussion about it on a previous blog post but hopefully everything will get wrapped up, RTM, and will be available to MSDN Subscriber Downloads before the launch date.  Fingers crossed!

[Updated] Also, a Release Candidate will be available for all of these products in February and will include a public  “Go-Live” license just like Beta 2.  Be sure to upgrade to the RC as soon as possible and report any issues that you may be experiencing quickly since the time between RC and RTM will be very short.  I’m sure the product group’s largest goal is to make sure there are no show-stoppers being discovered in the RC.

Ed Blankenship

Surprisingly, I’ve heard from several people that they still want a hard-copy document form of artifacts that are getting stored in TFS like Test Plan documents or Requirements documents.  I can understand some situations like if you need to follow certain regulatory requirements as so forth but don’t really see the need beyond that why you would ever want a hard-copy :)  Help me understand more if you happen to be in that boat!

Anyhow, if you need a hard-copy test plan document then you are in luck!  Test Scribe has just been released which will take your test plan information, artifacts, and progress from TFS and generate a nice Word document.  Quite handy!  If only we can get the Requirements document power tool now then we’ll satisfy that other group of people!

I'd like to announce the beta availability of Team Test's first Power Tool release for Visual Studio 2010: Test Scribe.  This tool allows users of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 to generate a Word 2007-compatible Test Plan Document from their plan, suites, test cases, and other artifacts.  Using the tool is a fairly straightforward process, including:

   1. Launch the Test Scribe tool.
   2. Enter your server/collection URL (e.g. http://myserver:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection)
   3. Select a Project.
   4. Select a Test Plan (previously created in MTM).
   5. Click the Generate button.

The resulting document will contain (among other things) a list suites with test cases and steps detail and pie charts detailing the overall progress of your Test Plan.  You can see a screenshot below showing several sections of a generated document.  Feedback is welcome and appreciated, and you can find the tool download at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d18873c7-909d-4788-a56e-0c496a1d8bb9.

Many thanks and appreciation to everyone who helped get this tool out the door.

More information available here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2010/01/11/test-scribe-test-plan-documentation-for-mtlm-plans.aspx

Ed Blankenship

Not sure if you have seen this but some of the product managers on the TFS Build team at Microsoft have been putting together some great blog posts for how to create custom build activities and get a little background about Windows Workflow 4.0 and how it relates to TFS Build 2010.

• How to Create a Custom Workflow Activity for TFS Build 2010 by Jim Lamb
• Windows Workflow 4.0 – CopyDirectory (Part 1 of 3) by Patrick Carnahan
• Windows Workflow 4.0 – CopyDirectory (Part 2 of 3) by Patrick Carnahan
• Windows Workflow 4.0 – CopyDirectory (Part 3 of 3) by Patrick Carnahan
• Windows Workflow 4.0 – CopyFile by Patrick Carnahan
• Writing Custom Activities for TFS Build 2010 (Beta 1) by Aaron Hallberg
• Display Custom Build Information by Jason Prickett
• Modifying the Default Display of Build Information by Jason Prickett

Also, we’ve been trying to put together a CodePlex project that’s designed to be a central location for contributions of Team Build 2010 customizations like custom activities, build process template customizations, build tools, etc.  You can take a look here:  http://teambuild2010contrib.codeplex.com/.  I’d encourage you to think about contributing any of your customizations to this project.  I know I’m personally hoping that it will be the “go-to” place for some of the common build activities that people need.  If you happen to have any feature requests for build activities, feel free to request one in the discussions and we’ll add it to the backlog:  http://teambuild2010contrib.codeplex.com/Thread/List.aspx

Thanks!

Ed Blankenship

In Team Foundation Server 2010, you know have the ability to (easily) have multiple build agents on the same build server.  You were able to do this in TFS 2008 but it really wasn’t supported.  However, this raises an interesting challenge:  some processes and executables aren’t designed to handle being run simultaneously in multiple contexts on the same build machine.  Some applications can’t or have a difficult time handling concurrent access from multiple build servers at the same time as well.

I’ve listed a few of the scenarios that I can I remember off the top of my head:

• Automated UI Testing – running automated UI tests from two different builds on the same build machine can lead into utter confusion!  :)  Mouse clicks going everywhere!  Let’s just stick to one set of automated UI tests running on an individual machine at the same time.
• Running Automated Tests that Collect Code Coverage Information -  This was an interesting limitation that I found in the 2008 release.  It seems that the code coverage data collector did not support collecting from more than one automated testing run happening concurrently on the same machine.  (This might actually have been addressed in the 2010 release but I’m not quite sure.)
• Dotfuscator – As far as I remember, this was another tool I remember having concurrency issues on the same build machine.
• Symbol Server Store Access – This is something new to me and I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details behind this limitation.  It looks like you can not use the symbol server publishing tools against the same symbol server storage location at the same time even on multiple machines.  (See example below.)
• Other Tools – I’m sure there are other build processes and tools we use that have limitations.  I’m sure many will be found out now that concurrent usage is more easily possible now.  Leave a comment below if you find any other examples and I’ll add them to this list.

Thankfully, the Team Build folks have provided us the ability to handle those specific scenarios where concurrent access isn’t supported as part of the build process.  That’s through the use of the Shared Resource Scope activity.  (Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities.SharedResourceScope)

Basically what it does is define a region of the build process that will only be allowed to be entered by one build across the entire Team Project Collection (even multiple build machines/agents) that share a matching resource name string.  It’s very similar to how we use the lock statement in C# or creating mutex objects.  (You might have to dust off those old computer science books from school.)

However, if you only want to limit the scope to a particular build server (instead of the entire Team Project Collection) then you can just put the build server machine name into the resource name string.  Don’t hardcode the machine name though and instead use one of the properties that are provided for you (in case the build doesn’t run on the same build machine every run because of the new agent pooling feature.)  Instead you could use an approach like this for the resource name expression:

          =String.Format(“{0}_{1}”,
BuildAgent.BuildServer, “AutomatedUITesting”)
        

Example in the Default Build Process Template in TFS 2010

Interestingly, there is an example usage of this activity and pattern available for us to look at in the default build process template file that’s available out of the box.  It’s usually located in version control here:  $/TeamProjectName/BuildProcessTemplates/DefaultTemplate.xaml.  Lower down in the default process, there is a section that attempt to publish the symbols to a symbol server storage location if you have specified it in your build definition properties.  My Assumption:  However, since only one build server can be publishing to a particular location at the same time, then a controlled scoped region is created based on the location property. (SourceAndSymbolServerSettings.SymbolStorePath)

That way you don’t have to worry about any build agent inside a Team Project Collection ever publishing to the same symbol server location at the same time.

Recently added:  It looks like this particular issue has already been discussed and that my assumption above is correct.  Adam blogs about it here.  Check it out.  How about that?

One more thing to note about symbol server publishing is the use of the SharedResourceScope activity in the build process template. The purpose is to make sure that concurrent instances of symstore.exe aren’t adding symbols at the same time, as the tool doesn’t support concurrent access to a symbol server share. SharedResourceScope uses the Team Foundation Server to control access to an arbitrarily named resource, in this case the share. That way, if multiple builds are trying to publish symbols at the same time, the requests are queued and only one will publish at a time, while the others wait (instead of fail due to file access errors or “step on each others’ toes”). PublishSymbols does not care about shared resource locks, but it is contained within the SharedResourceScope, so won’t be executed until the lock is appropriately acquired.

Other Properties Available for SharedResourceScope Activity

As you can see above there are a few other properties available for you to configure for this activity:

• MaxExecutionTime:  This is a TimeSpan that can be specified to limit the amount of time that a particular agent has control of the scope.  This is particularly useful for a resource scope that is going to be heavily used and can help you prevent a rogue build from eating up that resource indefinitely.  If the process inside the scope can’t complete before this time period has expired then an exception gets thrown.
• MaxWaitTime:  This is a TimeSpan that can be specified to limit the amount of time to wait for control of the scope.  The example above limits the amount of waiting to one hour and if it doesn’t reserve the scope within that time period an exception gets thrown.

Thanks to Aaron Hallberg for all of the background information and existence of this activity!

Ed Blankenship

Just saw the new stadium diagram for the ALM features (Visual Studio “Team System”) in Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010.  Enjoy!

Ed Blankenship

I learned a very important tip today about Microsoft Test & Lab Manager.  The data collectors that you can specify in your test runs (which by the way are extremely helpful) don’t necessarily attach data to the test run or bug all of the time.  It depends on the actual success of the test case during the test run.  Two example were mentioned today:

• IntelliTrace – The IntellIiTrace data collector will only output a trace log if the test case fails.
• Test Impact Analysis – The Test Impact data collector will only publish test impact data back to Team Foundation Server if the test case succeeds.

So this leads us to the fact that we won’t ever see both of them together at the same time.  If you see an IntelliTrace trace log file for a test case then you won’t be getting any test impact data published to the server (and vice versa.)  Be sure to have both of them enabled though if you would like to get that type of data when the test case ends.  This also helps me in figuring out why I haven’t been getting impacted tests in my build reports and the handy view of “recommend tests” based on choosing a build in MTLM.  I need to actually pass some tests to get that data published back up to the server!

How about that?  Very handy to know.  The Visual Studio Quality Tools team has a blog that has been very active lately.  If you would like to learn more about Microsoft Test & Lab Manager head on over to the site.

Ed Blankenship

If you’ve had the responsibility of administering a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server you may have run in the “Display Name” problem before.  In March 2007, the TFS Work Item Tracking team put a great post together about what’s exactly going on and it’s available here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/03/15/handling-display-name-changes-in-team-foundation-server.aspx

Basically, in TFS work item types, you can specify a field to hold the name of a user like in the Assigned To field.  The value that gets stored is basically just a string value of the person’s Display Name in Active Directory.  Not so bad except it’s not a strongly-typed object of a user but is just a string.  The problem comes when the user’s display name gets changed in Active Directory like when an employee gets married and take’s their spouse’s last name.  This causes a problem because all of the work items are still assigned to “Jane Doe” instead of “Jane NewLastName".  Even worse, “Jane Doe” is not even a valid user any longer so the work item becomes in an invalid state.  It’s kind of a maintenance nightmare.

Background:  Every hour an Active Directory synchronization job gets queued up and processes changes to Active Directory like new users, group membership changes, etc.  TFS keeps a cache of AD locally to help with operations across several subsystems.  For users, it caches certain information like the primary e-mail address, display name, domain/user name, SID, distinguished name, etc.

Thankfully there was something that helped us out available in the TFS Power Tools release called “TFS Users.”  You had to know about the display name change so working closely with your IT department was important.  Thankfully, it looks like TFS 2010 has added some abilities to notice those display name changes and proactively help you out within your system.  One of those changes is a new attribute in your work item type definitions that tells TFS which fields to automatically update.  I’ve bolded and underlined all of the changes from the previous default definition of the MSF Agile Bug.

            <
            FIELD 
            name
            ="Assigned
To" refname="System.AssignedTo" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"reportable="dimension">
<VALIDUSER />
<HELPTEXT>The
person currently working on this bug</HELPTEXT>
</FIELD>
<FIELD name="Activated
By" refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ActivatedBy" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"reportable="dimension">
<WHENNOTCHANGED field="System.State"> <ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE /> <READONLY />
</WHENNOTCHANGED>
</FIELD>
<FIELD name="Changed
By" refname="System.ChangedBy" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"reportable="dimension"> <ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE /> <VALIDUSER />
</FIELD>
<FIELD name="Closed
By" refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ClosedBy" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"reportable="dimension">
<WHENNOTCHANGED field="System.State"> <ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE /> <READONLY />
</WHENNOTCHANGED>
</FIELD>
<FIELD name="Created
By" refname="System.CreatedBy" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"reportable="dimension" />
<FIELD name="Authorized
As" refname="System.AuthorizedAs" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"/>
<FIELD name="Resolved
By" refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ResolvedBy" type="String" syncnamechanges="true"reportable="dimension">
<WHENNOTCHANGED field="System.State"> <ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE /> <READONLY />
</WHENNOTCHANGED>
</FIELD>

If you have custom process templates or you have modified the out of the box process templates, you’ll have to do some maintenance to your existing team projects to light up the new TFS 2010 features available including the ability to automatically sync the name changes from Active Directory.  If you are using the MSF Agile template you will want to update the following fields:

• Assigned To
• Activated By
• Changed By
• Closed By
• Created By
• Authorized As
• Resolved By

For all other process templates, you’ll want to update the work item types that have fields that hold display name values.  There is actually some great information already available about this particular topic available in the MSDN Library:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd286562(VS.100).aspx

One of the other things we notice from the changes are the addition of the ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE rule to some of the fields.  This rule allows a previously entered value to still be valid even if that value is no longer a valid value.  In addition, there are also some state/transition rule changes for allowing the existing value.  Be sure to do a diff against your current work item type definition and the new MSF Agile work item type definitions to find all of the new changes.

For more information about managing work item type fields in TFS, see this MSDN Library Article:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd236909(VS.100).aspx

Ed Blankenship

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this suggestion from people:  “Microsoft should just buy TeamPrise and make the Eclipse and non-Windows clients just part of the TFS product.”

That day is finally here.  Microsoft has purchased the TeamPrise-related assets from SourceGear.  More details about the acquisition announcement are available at Microsoft’s PressPass site and also the Pathways site for TeamPrise and Visual Studio.

Also, in addition to purchasing the TeamPrise assets, Microsoft has also hired a majority of the development team including, most notably, Martin Woodward who has been an absolutely fantastic part of the “Team System” MVP group.  It will be really sad to see Martin leave the group (as of today) but something tells me that he won’t be hiding :)  Congratulations to him and the entire team!

Now the one thing that i think people might be worried about will be what will happen to the future of the TeamPrise clients and will that development team be able to innovate as quickly as they had before?  I’m pretty sure the same “mission” will be in place and the team will be able to more closely leverage the other team members and assets within the Team Foundation Server product team.  As far as speed of innovation, that’s tough to tell.  Most other Microsoft products have tons of release requirements that slow them down such as localization, security reviews, etc.  All of which are great things but do end up slowing you down if you have to support those requirements.  Who knows if the TeamPrise development team will have to support them?  My guess is that if they’re going to be part of the “Visual Studio” product line that they will have the very similar if not the same requirements as the rest of the stack.  We will definitely see…  Another possible hang up is that Microsoft (specifically Developer Division) will have to learn how to sell & market a Java/non-Windows based product.  I can only imagine there will be some growing pains.

As far as licensing, right now you’ll need to still purchase the TeamPrise clients and get support from TeamPrise directly.  A Microsoft-branded “TeamPrise” client will become available with the 2010 release.  If you own a current license of the TeamPrise 3.3 software it looks like you’ll be upgraded to the new version when it is released.  Also, if you own a Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN license at the time you’ll get access to download the new clients from MSDN Subscriber Downloads.  After the 2010 release, it looks like there will be a new SKU available to be able to purchase just the new clients that will also include a CAL for Team Foundation Server that will run somewhere around $799 retail.

I’m excited about the decision and it looks like both Martin and Brian Harry are as well.  I’m excited to see the platform broaden and truly support teams who have heterogeneous development environments!

Ed Blankenship

Looks like there is a new migration tool being made available that helps you with importing test cases into TFS 2010 which now has Test Case Management as one of it’s new features.  It’s now available on CodePlex and works with the Beta 2 release.  Here’s some of the features available:

• Imports Test case information (along with Test Steps) present in Excel into TCM/TFS server – Note: This is ONE way migration only
• Provides a wizard based UI to run the tool one file at a time
• Provides a command line support to run the tool in a batch mode
• Allows you to save your selections/configurations into a mappings file to be reused later
• Default mapping file that works across both Agile based and CMMI based projects are shipped along with the tool

http://tcmimport.codeplex.com/

I believe some systems allow you to export your test cases into Excel (HP Quality Center?) so this might be a good migration option.  You can also use the TFS 2010 SDK to build a custom migration utility that will import from another system without having to go through Excel at first.  Take a look at it and see if it might be helpful for you!

Ed Blankenship

Over the past two weeks, I’ve really been hitting VS & TFS 2010 Beta 2 pretty hard.  I’ve found a few things and used Connect to report some suggestions & problems that I’ve found.  The product teams have been very active about responding to each of them and it’s been a very pleasant experience.

It looks like the product team wants even more feedback from everyone so if you could head over to the 2010 Beta 2 Survey and give your feedback, I know it will be greatly appreciated.  It’s pretty quick and easy with about 11 questions and about 3 optional free-fill questions that you can type longer responses in.

Ed Blankenship

I get this question a lot.  People often wonder what Team Foundation Server (TFS) is and why would you use it?  I read a blog post earlier today from Jason Zander who has the best explanation of TFS that I know.  Also, he hits the nail on the head about the “well, can’t I just integrate all these other systems together?”  I love the analogy he uses (emphasis added:)

First let’s talk about “why TFS?”  The goal of Team Foundation Server is to create a central repository with a set of tools that make it really easy to collaborate between roles.  You could try to stitch together multiple disparate systems as follows:

In this case each system has its own storage, own set of identity for assets, own commands and tools.  Getting this going is like trying to hook up a set of custom stereo components:  you can pull it off but it’s going to be a lot of work and you are missing out on some stuff.

What I’d rather have is a system which can integrate these items together and then enable my default work flow through the system:

Even better, with TFS 2010 you get the opportunity to add even more pieces to the ALM puzzle under one roof:

A good Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system has all of these systems integrated together and linked to provide you as much transparency, traceability, and metrics available about the relationships between the artifacts in those systems.  TFS is the best system available today that has all of that built together.

Ed Blankenship

If you missed the news on Monday, Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 are available to download by both MSDN Subscribers and everyone else in the world!  This is really huge!  Beta 2 has already been a really solid release since I first downloaded and installed it.  The performance of the new WPF-based IDE has been dramatically improved from earlier builds.

Visual Studio

• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (.ISO)
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium (.ISO)
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional (.ISO)

Visual Studio Extensibility

• Visual Studio 2010 SDK (.EXE)

.NET Framework

• .NET Framework 4 (redistributable .EXE)
• .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (redistributable .EXE)

Team Foundation Server

• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (.ISO)
• Visual Studio Team Explorer (.ISO)

Test Products

• Visual Studio Test Elements (.ISO)
• Visual Studio Team Lab Management
• Visual Studio Team Agents (.ISO)

Express

• Visual Basic Express (.EXE)
• Visual C++ Express (.EXE)
• Visual C# Express (.EXE)
• Visual Web Developer Express (.EXE)
• Express Combo DVD (.ISO) (includes all four Express installs)

There was also a ton of news coming out ranging from Licensing and SKU changes, the launch data for the 2010 release (which is March 22, 2010,) what you get upgraded to if you have an active MSDN Subscription on a launch day, and a whole bunch of great things!  I’m really excited about this 2010 release wave.  There’s a ton of great stuff designed to make everyone’s life that much easier when they’re developing, testing, and building applications.

“Go-Live” License

One of the great things about the Beta 2 release is that Microsoft has announced that you can use Beta 2 in production environments and also to build production applications.  This “go-live” license includes .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Team Foundation Server 2010.  Jeff Beehler blogged earlier about what “go-live” actually means so be sure to read through it closely.  Beta 2 is a very solid Visual Studio and TFS build.  However, there is always some risk with upgrading production environments using Beta software.  Be sure you understand the risks before taking the plunge. 

I’d suggest that if you are able to take the risk that you upgrade to both Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 Beta 2 as soon as you can.  Remember that even if you don’t want to run .NET 4 for your production applications, you can still use Visual Studio 2010 to edit solutions/projects that target .NET 3.5, .NET 3.0, and .NET 2.0!

If you’re not able to take the risk to “go-live” during the Beta 2 timeframe then I would definitely suggest that you begin you testing & evaluation process now using the Beta 2 build.  You’re able to test out the upgrade process from your TFS 2008 databases and discover any possible hang-ups during the upgrade process. (I personally haven’t had any for the servers that I have upgraded but you never know!)  By getting your planning & testing done now, you’re in a better position to upgrade when TFS 2010 is released at the beginning of the year.  Another thing you could do to get ready is be sure that you’ve upgraded any prerequisites.  For example, even while you are running TFS 2008 you can upgrade your SQL Server instance to 2008 and upgrade your Windows SharePoint Services install to WSS 3.0.  Using SQL Server 2005 or WSS 2.0 is not supported in TFS 2010 so this will just make things a ton easier for you when it actually is time to upgrade.

Launch Date vs RTM

I mentioned about that the launch date was announced for March 22, 2010.  However, launch doesn’t necessarily mean Release to Manufacturing (RTM.)  Products usually RTM before launch day but there have been a few exceptions.  For example, SQL Server 2008 RTM’d much later than it’s launch date :)  Hopefully that never happens again.  What’s great about RTM is that if you’re an active MSDN subscriber, you usually get access to download the final build shortly after RTM based on past releases of products.  Launch day for Windows 7 is tomorrow but RTM was earlier this summer and MSDN Subscribers have had access since August 6, 2009.  (This does not mean in any way that there will be that much lead time for the Visual Studio 2010 release… I’d say it’s probably very unlikely!)

There’s really a lot of news to process so I’ll be posting some articles next week that goes into detail about several of them.  If there’s anything in particular that you’re not quite sure of, feel free to contact me or leave me a comment about something that needs more information.  In the meantime, please do help out by making this the best Visual Studio release ever.  If you find a bug or think a scenario could be improved (be reasonable) be sure to log it at the Microsoft Connect site.

Take care and have fun,

Ed Blankenship

Disclaimer:  I’m writing this at a time when only Beta 1 is available for Visual Studio Team System 2010 so the information may have changed by the time it has been released.  I have included links to the relevant MSDN articles which should remain valid after release time so just double-check.

This small little additional feature is actually one that I have been looking forward to for a long time.  In Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010, you will now be able to limit your test runs to specific test categories with a new command-line option on MSTest.exe and therefore in Team Build 2010 which calls MSTest.exe automatically for you.

Back in the day… You would need to create test lists (.VSMDI files) in VSTS 2005 and VSTS 2008 to basically “categorize” your automated unit tests by putting them into different lists.  One handy thing about them is that the lists could be hierarchical which helps out at build time.  When you wanted to run a specific subset of tests either locally using MSTest.exe or in Team Build, you would just specify the .VSMDI file to use and then the test list you wanted to run.  Not too bad, but it’s a pain to keep up with those test lists.  Serious pain.  However, the thing that I hated absolutely most about them is that you could only edit the .VSDMI files if you purchased Visual Studio Team Suite or the Tester Edition.  So that means that if you have just the VSTS Developer Edition then you are pretty much out of luck.  For most places that I have seen, it’s usually the developers maintaining those test list files not the testers.

For this reason I actually prefer and will be recommending the Test Container and Category approach going forward in 2010.  Test Containers are essentially files that contain tests in them.  For example, unit tests (and other compiled tests) are stored in .dll files and ordered tests are in .orderedtest files.  I like this approach.  In automated builds I just want to specify which files contain the tests that I want to run and then if I want to limit the test run to just a subset I can just list which categories to run. 

A great example of this is what I call the “BVT” category.  These are the tests that you have identified to be your “smoke” tests that make sure a build is okay.  If these tests fail then you’ve probably got a bad build.  (BVT = Build Verification Tests) So I would limit the test runs on any CI or even the new Gated Check-In builds to just those BVT tests.  Quick & dirty verification is really all you need for those builds leaving a more extensive automated test pass to happen during the nightly or weekly build.  If you’re not familiar with the new Gated Check-In feature in TFS 2010, check out Brian’s blog post or Patrick’s blog postfor more information.  It’s a killer feature.

This does rely on one thing though… each “developer” of an automated test needs to make sure they add the correct attribute(s) to their test methods.  You don’t have to keep up with maintaining the .VSDMI files any longer but you do have to make sure you mark each method appropriately.

You can even use test categories with the new types of automated tests available in 2010 like Coded UI Tests.  It doesn’t just have to be unit tests.

How to Specify a Category in an Automated Test

This part is pretty easy.  You just add as many TestCategory attributes to the test method as you need.  Here’s an example in C# using multiple test categories for a test method called DebitTest:

[TestCategory("Nightly"), TestCategory("Weekly"), TestCategory("Monthly"), TestMethod()] public
void DebitTest() { }

Alternately, you can select a test in the Test View tool window and then set the category by using the Properties tool window in Visual Studio and it will add the appropriate attributes to the methods for you.

How to Specify which Categories to Run in an Automated Build with Team Build 2010

Okay… this part is easy too. :)  Build definitions now have build properties that can be exposed to the end user in the Build Definition Details dialog or in the Queue Build dialog.  This is handy because you could by default not set a filter to run under normal circumstances (triggered or default manual builds) or you can change it when manually queuing a build if you want that build to run differently.  Either way it’s the same for setting the categories.  If you’re using the default build process workflow that is available out of the box, then just scroll down through the property list until you reach the Testing section which includes a build property called Test Category.  Leave it blank if you want to run all tests or specify the categories you’d like to limit it too:

According to the MSDN documentation for the Test Category switch, you can combine multiple categories in different combinations instead of just specifying one category.  Very handy – here’s some examples:

/category:group1 runs tests in the test category "group1".

/category:"group1&group2" runs tests that are in both test categories "group1" and "group2." Tests that are only in one of the specified test categories will not be run.

/category:"group1|group2" runs tests that are in test category "group1" or "group2". Tests that are in both test categories will also be run.

/category:"group1&!group2" runs tests from the test category "group1" that are not in the test category "group2." A test that is in both test category "group1" and "group2" will not be run.

What I’m not sure about is whether you can specify test categories when using the old Upgrade Build Workflow template .xaml file… I’ll check on that and then update the blog post.

It’s worth noting that if you are going to use the test category method to limit test runs, you must use test containers.

Limiting Test Runs Based on Test Priorities

If you noticed in the screenshot above from Team Build, you can also limit your test run to tests that are in a specific priority range.  How do you specify the range for your test methods?  You can use the Properties window when selecting a test in the Test View tool window or you can add the Priority attribute manually to the test method.  After that you just specify the range of priorities to use in the test run.

[TestCategory("Nightly"), TestCategory("Weekly"), TestCategory("Monthly")]
[TestMethod()] [Priority(1)] public
void DebitTest() { }

Additional Note:  It appears that the product team is actually encouraging people to move away from the old .VSDMI approach in favor of categories.  Check their note out:

Note

Test categories are recommended for use over the test lists functionality from earlier versions of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Test, unless you have to create a check-in policy which requires a test list. For more information about check-in policies, see How to: Add Check-In Policies.

Take care and happy testing,

Ed Blankenship

Now this is really cool!  There is a really cool visualization when using Team System Web Access that shows the workflow of the work item that I thought would be really cool if we could have in the Team Explorer client inside Visual Studio.  Well thankfully, Michel Perfetti (author of Fissum) just released a custom work item control that does exactly what TSWA does…

Remember, you can have different work item form layouts based on what client it is going to be loaded in so you could specify a layout for “WinForms” that would be the only one that would load this custom control.  Check out Neno’s blog post about this topic for more information.

Check it out on CodePlex:  http://tfsworkflowcontrol.codeplex.com/

Ed Blankenship

Just wanted to take a few seconds to post the slide deck I’m using for my Real World TFS sessions.  I’ll post a link to the recording of the MVP TV session earlier today when it’s made available!

Ed Blankenship