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Change Environment settings in VS 2010

If you first start up VS 2010 you have to choose your environment settings. Once chosen, you will never get this screen back. Sometimes you choose the “wrong” one and you cannot find your stuff anymore.

How to reset this. After searching in Options etc. I could not find it. At the customer I installed a fresh copy of VS and I got the familiar screen again. On this screen are also instructions how to reset.

Go to Tools | Import and Export Settings and then choose “Reset all Settings”.

VS settings

(De) Attach Team Project Collections

In TFS 2010 Team Project Collections are introduced. This is great because it allows you to maintain your Team Projects in a better way. With TFS 2008 you had to build a complete new server for it. For an overview of Team Project Collections read this article by Brian Harry.

You can attach and detach Team Project Collections. A detached Team Project Collection is portable and can be restored on another server or can be stored offline. This is possible because, in contrary of TFS 2008, all information is stored in one database per Team Project Collection.

But beware !

Last week I was preparing some demos for my presentation. I made a backup of my Team Project Collection after I set this collection “offline”. After a while I restored the database and everything was fine. Later on, I detached my TPC and copied it somewhere else. Then I restored my earlier (offline and thus attached) Team Project Collection.

Then my problem came up. I could not attach my TPC anymore (somewhat logical) and I could not access my data. It became a long night to put al my demo’s back in place.

Only properly de-attached Team Project Collections can be reattached! if you backup your collection database, make sure to know in what state it is. Put in the backup name so that you don’t get in trouble if you must attach,detach or bring your TPC on or offline.

TFS Console

Presentatie dotNed meeting 23-6-2010

Op 23-6 2010 heb ik voor de dotNed gebruikers groep een presentatie gegeven over het selecteren van een branching en merging strategie.

Dank aan de dotNed groep voor de uitnodiging en gastvrijheid.

De slides van deze presentatie kunnen hier gedownload worden.

Delta-N staat op de DevDays 2010

Delta-N is sponsor op de DevDays 2010 die dit jaar worden gehouden in het Congresgebouw te Den Haag. De stand kunt u vinden in het ALM lab direct bij binnenkomst.
Download de plattegrond en agenda. (15MB)

Dit jaar staat alles in het teken van Visual Studio 2010. Laat u informeren over de nieuwe mogelijkheden van de meest uitgebreide versie: Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate en vraag naar de upgrade-en migratie mogelijkheden. Naast onze aanwezigheid in het ALM lab verzorgen wij ook een ALM Best Practices sessie over "Selecting an Optimal Branch and Merge Strategy"

Leer welke nieuwe mogelijkheden er beschikbaar komen in Visual Studio 2010 en TFS 2010 op het gebied van branching en merging, en hoe uw nieuwe Best Practices integreert in uw eigen aanpak. TFS 2010 bevat veel nieuwe functionaliteit voor de ondersteuning van uw eigen branch strategie, branches zijn First class citizens geworden in TFS 2010 en kunnen ook visueel worden weergegeven. Daarnaast bevat TFS 2010 unieke mogelijkheden om een changeset te traceren binnen de diverse branches. Tijdens het interactieve gedeelte zal er de mogelijkheid zijn om vragen te stellen en zullen diverse voorbeelden gegeven worden om de Best Practices te demonstreren.

Spreker: René van Osnabrugge
Datum: 31 maart.
Tijd: 13.15 - 14.30 uur
Locatie: Zaal Antartica (begane grond)
Level: 200

Delete the Version Control Cache!

This weekend we finished a complex TFS 2008 migration. Before this final migration we did a test migration a few weeks earlier. Fot this migration we built up a complete new environment.

The migration went perfect and quick because everything was set up earlier in the test migration. Basically it was only a matter of restoring the last databases, perform some migration steps and we were up and running.

After the migration we started testing. We could not get a build to work. After investigating this we discovered that the content of a specific TFS file changed during migration. The old server showed completely different content. This is something to worry about.

Ater searching we discovered that the Version Control cache on the TS server is not automatically updated. Most of the files in there were not changed since the test migration. Probably the Version Control cache does not work with Id’s but with another mechanism so it showed different files because there has been some changes.

After deleting the Version Control Cache (Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008/Web Services/Version Control/Data/Cache) everything worked.

Just to be sure we repeated these steps on the proxy servers as well!

Trying out Team System 2008 (and extending the license with 30 days)

In the past few months I worked at a client how wanted to switch from Visual Source Safe to Team System 2008. For political reasons they started with the trail version and and started the process to acquire the licenses. this took a little longer then expected so one morning TFS was not accessible anymore. What now…

Fortunately there is a way to extend the trail license. The tool Tfsversiondetection.exe not only detects the version of TFS but if you are running a trail version and it has expired you can extend the license with 30 days.

After extending the license all was well and the licensing will be fixed soon.

A downloadable version of Tfsversiondetection is available here.

Clean up TFS

If you are testing things with TFS, the number of Work Items and Projects can grow pretty fast. There are ways to destroy projects and work items, only they are command line tools.

You can use “tfpt destroyWI” to destroy work items and tfsDeleteProject to delete Projects

This small application deletes projects and Work Items by means of a User Interface..

Needed:

  • Team Explorer 2008
  • TFS October Powertools

Use at own risk. No guarantees and no liability what so ever :-). The code is included if some paths have to be changed.

image

Happy Destroying!

Download Tool

Useful Build Properties

When I was busy defining some builds with TFS, I was looking for the default Build Properties that can be used in TFS Build. Martin Woodward described them and this is very useful. So I am copying his work in order to make other people happy as well!

Property
Description
Example

BuildDefinition

Build Definition Name

Team Build Example CI

TeamFoundationServerUrl

The URL of the Team Foundation Server

http://tfsserver:8080/

TeamProject

Team Project build is running in

TeamProject

SourceGetVersion

Version to get when doing build

C1234

BuildDirectory

Working directory for build

c:\buildworking\TeamProject\Team Build Example CI

BuildDefinitionName

Name of build definition

Team Build Example CI

BuildNumber

identifies the name of the build, i.e., the build number

Team Build Example CI_20070723.3

DropLocation

Location of drop folder

\\jeeves\drop\fixupload

MachineName

Name of build machine

buildserver.teamprise.com

RequestedBy

User requesting build (in DOMAIN\Username format).  In a CI build, this will be less meaningful as it is a service user.

Team Build System Account

RequestedFor

User that build was requested for (in DOMAIN\Username format).  In a CI build this will be the user who performed the check-in that triggered the build

DOMAIN\username

StartTime

Build start date/time

07/23/2007 10:44:43

IncrementalGet

Set this property to true to do an incremental get - this will override the CleanCompilationOutputOnly, SkipInitializeWorkspace, and ForceGet properties

FALSE

IncrementalBuild

Set this property to true to do an incremental build - this will override the SkipClean, SkipInitializeWorkspace, and ForceGet properties

FALSE

SkipClean

Set this property to true to skip the CoreClean target

FALSE

SkipLabel

Set this property to true to skip the CoreLabel target

FALSE

SkipPostBuild

Set this property to true to skip the PostBuild target

FALSE

SkipGetChangesetsAndUpdateWorkItems

Set this property to skip the CoreGetChangesetsAndUpdateWorkItems target, which calls the GenCheckinNotesUpdateWorkItems task

FALSE

SkipDropBuild

Set this property to true to skip the CoreDropBuild target

FALSE

SkipWorkItemCreation

Set this property to true to skip the CoreCreateWorkItem target

FALSE

StopOnFirstFailure

Set this property to true to stop Cleaning, Compiling, and/or Testing on the first failure encountered

FALSE

SolutionRoot

points to the root of the sources folder on build server

c:\buildworking\TeamProject\Team Build Example CI\BuildType\..\Sources

BinariesRoot

points to the root of the binaries folder on the build server

c:\buildworking\TeamProject\Team Build Example CI\BuildType\..\Sources\..\Binaries

TestResultsRoot

points to the root of the test results folder on the build server

c:\buildworking\TeamProject\Team Build Example CI\BuildType\..\Sources\..\TestResults

WorkspaceName

The name of the workspace that will be used for getting sources. Note: Workspace name can be up to 64 characters long - after that it will be truncated.

$(COMPUTERNAME)_$(TeamProject)_$(BuildDefinition)

GetPopulateOutput

Set this to true to populate the Gets, Replaces, and Deletes item group outputs of the Get task

FALSE

LabelComment

The comment used by the Label task

Label created by Team Build

LabelName

The label name used by the Label task.  By default the label name is set to $(BuildNumber) in the InitializeEndToEndIteration target.

Team Build Example CI_20070723.3

Outhir

The location of the output files in the build working directory.

c:\buildworking\TeamProject\Team Build Example CI\BuildType\..\Sources\..\Binaries\Release\

BuildProperties

all properties into a single string for simple passing to child MSBuild task invocations.  See also "EscapedBuildProperties",

BuildAgentName=BuildServerAgent;BuildAgentUri=vstfs:///Build/Agent/1; BuildDirectory=c:\buildworking\TeamProject\Team Build Example CI; BuildDefinitionName=Team Build Example CI; BuildDefinitionUri=vstfs:///Build/Definition/1; BuildNumber=Team Build Example CI_20070723.3; ConfigurationFolderUri=vstfs:///VersionControl/VersionedItem/TeamProject%25252fTeamBuildTypes%25252fTeam%252bBuild%252bExample%252bCI%2526changesetVersion%253d5935%2526deletionId%253d0; ConfigurationFolderGetTime=07/23/2007 10:44:43; DropLocation=\\jeeves\drop\fixupload; MachineName=build.teamprise.com; MaxProcesses=1;Port=9191; RequestedBy=Team Build System Account; RequestedFor=DOMAIN\username; StartTime=07/23/2007 10:44:43

Source: http://www.woodwardweb.com/vsts/30_useful_team.html

 

Happy Coding!

Refreshing TFS Source Control Icons

When working on a Source Controlled solution with multiple persons, it often happens that file icons (checked out/checked in/checked out by someone)  are not synchronized.

I found this easy workaround on this blog

“Quoted from http://devmatter.blogspot.com/2007/07/refreshing-tfs-version-control-status.html

There is a way to refresh the status icons - by clicking on File-->Source Control-->Refresh Status.  This will update the status icons to reflect whether a file is checked in or out.  If you're like me and prefer to use the keyboard when possible, you can easily assign a hotkey to this command by:

  1. Click on the Tools-->Options menu item within Visual Studio.
  2. Click on the Environment-->Keyboard node.
  3. Enter "tfsrefreshstatus" into the Show commands containing textbox.
  4. Select the entry "File.TfsRefreshStatus".  This is the command that is executed when you click on File-->Source Control-->Refresh Status.
  5. Enter a shortcut by clicking in the Press shortcut keys textbox and pressing Ctrl+R, Ctrl+S (or any other command sequence you wish) and click on the Assign button. 

This works great!

TFS 2008 Web Access Client Permission Restrictions

The Web Access Client is a powerful tool for people who do not use Visual Studio to interact with the Team Foundation Server. However, in previous version it was a bit all or nothing. You could either see all content or not. There were some possibilities in hiding tabs but that was not enough.

In the TFS 2008 (SP1) Web Access Client, it is possible to really restrict permissions to certain groups.

image

image

Happy Coding

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