Effective Thoughts

Last week, I delivered a VSTS 2008 Tester Edition demo to a prospective client. Following up on a few questions to which I didn’t know the answer: Q. Can I use Subversion with TFS? A. I get this question all the time from developers. It’s a perfectly valid question. The answer is no…but yes…sort of. The version control repository (and all data) must remain SQL Server. Yes, it’s proprietary. Further, if you plan to use TFS in your software development environment, but choose not to leverage it for version control, it severely limits the usefulness of the information elicited from TFS (because you’re not feeding in the crucial VC data). If you’re not leveraging VC in TFS, you’re probably not leveraging Team Build either. That said, while a fully-integrated TFS for ALM and SCM is the ideal, there’s a compelling argument to leverage TFS as a repository for requirements, scenarios, test cases, functional and load testing as well as defect tracking. TFS is an excellent repository to s...

A little more than a month ago, I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Team System. I haven't said much about it because I try to remain a humble guy and frankly, I've been swamped with work/life. And, unlike a lot of awards, it's not really one you "go after"...it comes to you without a formula. What I really want to say about this is thank you. Thank you to the community for creating opportunities to present. Thank you to Microsoft for supporting technology professionals and creating jobs and careers around your products (and staying out of the way when I comes to implementation :). Thank you to the community leaders and professionals who dedicate their time and seemingly endless energy to making all of us stronger by creating environments of intense learning and camaraderie. Thank you to my employer for believing in my endeavors and investing in me the time to develop my TFS/VSTS skill set and share what I learn with the commun...

Recently, I had the pleasure of co-presenting (probably generous...I more just rode shotgun :) on VSTS 2010: Architecture Edition with Randy Pagels , Developer Platform Technical Specialist with Microsoft. We spoke to an impressively-attended internal user group at Cincinnati Financial . Thank you Randy for the invitation to co-present and Cincinnati Financial for having us in. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the current 2008 Architecture Edition. Too rigid. Doesn't roll with the punches very well. It's more of a lay-down-the-law boundaries at the beginning of the project without the flexibility of absorbing feedback and instituting ongoing, evolutionary change. The new version seems much more flexible and functional. It imposes a model / architecture but can be (and expects to be) adjusted easily over the life of the project. One can also institute a confirmation check of the code against the model during the automated build. It's less overbearing and more of a qua...

This is a frequent topic of conversation with friends visiting Chicago. I lived there for 8 years and loved Chicago...well, except for the October to May winters. Chicago has great sports, culture, festivals, events, shopping and...of course food. So I can avoid regurgitating this list every time I'm asked, here we go: Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinders (Pizza in a bowl...owner remembers wait list by your face) Cafe Babareeba (Spanish tapas) Giordano's (deep dish pizza; pass on Gino's...no where near as good) Portillo's (Loaded dogs) Joe's (get the Stone Crab if it's in season) Mon Ami Gabi (French) Tizi Melloul (Mediterranean) Mia Francesca's (Italian) Star of Siam (Tai) Mitchell's (breakfast) I'm sure I'm forgetting something but that's a good start. Enjoy!

I'm sure I missed a step somewhere during setup but...so the search engines catch 'em, I'm going to post my TFS/VSTS 2010 setup missteps below: Issue : "TF255147: The following server that is running SQL Server is not listening on the expected TCP port: SERVER" Resolution : Open SQL Server Configuration Manager. Under SQL Server Network Configuration, Protocols for MSSQLSERVER, right-mouse Enable TCP/IP. Restart SQL Server. Re-run TFS configuration wizard. Issue : "TF255282: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cannot be installed. The program is already installed on this server" Resolution : Open up Add/Remove Programs (or "Programs and Features" under Win2k8 Server) and remove Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Re-run TFS configuration wizard. Issue : Couldn't get Full-Text search within SQL 2008 to install. MSI (s) (14:AC) [00:03:21:091]: Source is incorrect. Unable to open or validate MSI package D:\Setup\sql_engine_core_shared.msi.M...

By default, Team Build (MSBuild-driven) wants to output compiled assets (assemblies, config, exe's, etc.) to a flattened ..\Binaries\Release|Debug directory. I had a client desiring to package up these assets in their relative, normal output directories into an MSI using WiX. Fortunately, there's a simple directive to set within the TFSBuild.proj file such that the individual project OutDir is honored: true Set this within the main PropertyGroup element for your build. Unless you're performing a custom check-out, you'll also need to turn off read-only attributes set during the Get from version control. Update this attribute in the AfterGet target using an Exec task:

Thanks for everyone attending my " Implementing an Agile Software Development Process with Team Foundation Server (TFS) " presentation today. We enjoyed some good discussion. I had a few TFS-related questions pop up which I thought I'd address in a post: Q. Is it possible to fail the build but only if a specific test fails? So, let's say we have 3 tests. If Test01 or Test02 fail, fail the build. If Test03 fails, don't fail the build. A. Not that I'm aware of. If any test fails in a build but compilation succeeded, that build lists a state of Partially Succeeded. With TFS 2008 SP1, we received a property to modify or control this behavior: TreatTestFailureAsBuildFailure. If true (false is the default), any test failure will set the build state to Failed (vs. Partially Succeeded). Nice write-up here . You might take the approach of creating two separate builds: one that contains all your tests and one containing just mission critical tests. Set TreatTestFailureA...