VSTS

When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects

Martin Hinshelwood — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:27:20 GMT

Well, it depends….

If you are a small company that creates a finite number of internal projects then you will find it easier to create a single project for each of your products and have TFS do the heavy lifting with reporting, SharePoint sites and Version Control.

But what if you are not…

Update 9th March 2010

Michael Fourie gave me some feedback which I have integrated.
Ed Blankenship via @edblankenship offered encouragement and a nice quote.
Ewald Hofman gave me a couple of Cons, and maybe a few more soon. Ewald’s company, Avanade, currently uses Areas, but it looks like the manual management is getting too much and the project is getting cluttered.

Updated 11th March 2010

Adam Cogan – Adam suggested I get our disagreement out in the open, improve the proposed solution description with some visual cues and move the Pros and Cons to the top. Last but not least, to plug out custom TFS template :)

What if you are likely to have hundreds of projects, possibly with a multitude of internal and external projects? You might have 1 project for a customer or 10. This is the situation that most consultancies find themselves in and thus they need a more sustainable and maintainable option. What I am advocating is that we should have 1 “Team Project” per customer, and use areas to create “sub projects” within that single “Team Project”.

"What you describe is what we generally do internally and what we recommend. We make very heavy use of area path to categorize the work within a larger project."
- Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow & Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server

This post has an ulterior motive as I am having this debate with my boss, Adam Cogan, and we both decided that we wanted to find out what the community at large thinks of this approach to managing projects in TFS. Adam thinks this is a bad idea as it is not supported “out-of-the-box”, and I think that a lot of things are not supported “out-of-the-box” in TFS which never the less, are a good idea, including this one.

"We tend to use areas to segregate multiple projects in the same team project and it works well."
- Tiago Pascoal, Visual Studio ALM MVP

"In general, I believe this approach provides consistency [to multi-product engagements] and lowers the administration and maintenance costs. All good."
- Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP

“@MrHinsh BTW, I'm very much a fan of very large, if not huge, team projects in TFS. Just FYI :) Use Areas & Iterations.”
Ed Blankenship, Visual Studio ALM MVP

I am proposing that SSW change from over 70 internal team projects:

SSW.CodeAuditor
SSW.SQLAuditor
SSW.SQLDeploy
etc

To 1 internal team project:

SSW
- CodeAuditor
- SQLAuditor
- SQLDeploy
- etc

Note: The single Team Project called “SSW” would contain all of our internal projects and consequently all of the Areas and Iteration move down one hierarchy to accommodate this. Where we would have had “\SSW\Sprint 1” we now have “\SSW\SqlDeploy\Sprint1” with “SqlDeploy” being our internal project. At the moment SSW has over 70 internal projects and more than 170 total projects in TFS.

This method has long term benefits that help to simplify the support model for companies that often have limited internal support time and many projects. But, there are implications as TFS does not provide this model “out-of-the-box”. These implications stretch across Areas, Iterations, Queries, Project Portal and Version Control.

Michael made a good comment, he said:

I agree with your approach, assuming that in a multi-product engagement with a client, they are happy to adopt the same process template across all products. If they are not, then it’ll either be easy to convince them or there is a valid reason for having a different template
- Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP

At SSW we have a standard SSW Agile process template that we use and this is applied across the board, to all of our projects. We even apply any changes to the core process template to all of our existing projects as well. If you have multiple projects for the same clients on multiple templates and you want to keep it that way, then this approach will not work for you. However, if you want to standardise as we have at SSW then this approach may benefit you as well.

Pros

You only have one project to upgrade when a process template changes – After going through an upgrade of over 170 project prior to the changes in the RC I can tell you that that many projects is no fun.
Standardises your Process Template – You will always have the same Process implementation across projects/products without exception
You get tighter control over the permissions – Yes, you can do this on a standard Team Project, but it gets a lot easier with practice.
You can “move” work items from one “product” to another – Have we not always wanted to do that.
You can rename your projects – Wahoo: everyone wants to do this, now you can.
One set of Reporting Services reports to manage – You set an area and iteration to run reports anyway, so you may as well set both.
Simplified Check-In Policies– There is only one set of check-in policies per client. This simplifies administration of policies.
Simplified Alerts – As alerts are applied across multiple projects this simplifies your alert rules as per client.

Cons

All of these cons could be mitigated by a custom tool that helps automate creation of “Sub-projects” within Team Projects. This custom tool could create areas, Iteration, permissions, SharePoint and queries. It just does not exist yet :)

You need to configure the Areas and Iterations – This is just like you would do for Sprints/Iterations and for functional areas of your application, but with 1 extra level at the top of the tree.
You need to configure the permissions – This I guess is the main configuration point. It is possible to create the same permissions as a Team Project at this level, but that would be a bit of configuration work.
You may need to configure sub sites for SharePoint (depends on your requirement) – If you have two projects/products in the same Team Project then you will not see the burn down for each one out-of-the-box, but rather a cumulative for the Team Project. This is not really that much of a problem as you would have to configure your burndown graphs for your current iteration anyway.
note: When you create a sub site to a TFS linked portal it will inherit the settings of its parent site :) This is fantastic as it means that you can easily create sub sites and then set the Area and Iteration path in each of the reports to be the correct one.
Every team wants their own customization (via Ewald Hofman) - small teams of 2 persons against teams of 30 – or even outsourcing – need their own process, you cannot allow that because everybody gets the same work item types.
note: Luckily at SSW this is not a problem as our template is standardised across all projects and customers.
Large list of builds (via Ewald Hofman) – As the build list in Team Explorer is just a flat list it can get very cluttered.
note: I would mitigate this by removing any build that has not been run in over 30 days. The build template and workflow will still be available in version control, but it will clean the list.

Implications around Areas

Areas should be used for topological classification/isolation of work items. You can think of this as architecture areas, organisational areas or even the main features of your application. In our scenario there is an additional top level item that represents the Project / Product that we want to chop our Team Project into.

Figure: Creating a sub area to represent a product/project is easy.

<teamproject>

<teamproject>\<Functional Area/module whatever>

Becomes:

<teamproject>

<teamproject>\<ProjectName>\

<teamproject>\<ProjectName>\<Functional Area/module whatever>

Implications around Iterations

Iterations should be used for chronological classification/isolation of work items. This could include isolated time boxes, milestones or release timelines and really depends on the logical flow of your project or projects. Due to the new level in Area we need to add the same level to Iteration. This is primarily because it is unlikely that the sprints in each of your projects/products will start and end at the same time. This is just a reality of managing multiple projects.

Figure: Adding the same Area value to Iteration as the top level item adds flexibility to Iteration.

<teamproject>\Sprint 1

<teamproject>\Release 1\Sprint 1

Becomes:

<teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Sprint 1

<teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Release 1\Sprint 1

Implications around Queries

Queries are used to filter your work items based on a specified level of granularity. There are a number of queries that are built into a project created using the MSF Agile 5.0 template, but we now have multiple projects and it would be a pain to have to edit all of the work items every time we changed project, and that would only allow one team to work on one project at a time.

Figure: The Queries that are created in a normal MSF Agile 5.0 project do not quite suit our new needs.

In order for project contributors to be able to query based on their project we need a couple of things. The first thing I did was to create an “_Area Template” folder that has a copy of the project layout with all the queries setup to filter based on the “_Area Template” Area and the “_Sprint template” you can see in the Area and Iteration views.

Figure: The template is currently easily drag and drop, but you then need to edit the queries to point at the right Area and Iteration. This needs a tool.

I then created an “Areas” folder to hold all of the area specific queries. So, when you go to create a new TFS Sub-Project you just drag “_Area Template” while holding “Ctrl” and drop it onto “Areas”. There is a little setup here. That said I managed it in around 10 minutes which is not so bad, and I can imagine it being quite easy to build a tool to create these queries

Figure: These new queries can be configured in around 10 minutes, which includes setting up the Area and Iteration as well.

Version Control

What about your source code? Well, that is the easiest of the lot. Just create a sub folder for each of your projects/products.

Figure: Creating sub folders in source control is easy as “Right click | Create new folder”.

<teamproject>\DEV\Main\

Becomes:

<teamproject>\<ProjectName>\DEV\Main\

Conclusion

I think it is up to each company to make a call on how you want to configure your Team Projects and it depends completely on how many projects/products you are going to have for each customer including yourself.

If we decide to utilise this route it will require some configuration to get our 170+ projects into this format, and I will probably be writing some tools to help.

Feedback

Now that I have explained this method, what do you think?

What other pros and cons can you see?
What do you think of this approach?
Will you be using it?
What tools would you like to support you?

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,TFS Administration,TFS,Team Foundation Server,Project Planning,TFS Customisation

Microsoft, please help me diagnose TFS Administration permission issues!

Martin Hinshelwood — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:00:58 GMT

I recently had a fun time trying to debug a permission issue I ran into using TFS 2010’s TfsConfig.

Update 5th March 2010 – In its style of true excellence my company has added rant to its “Suggestions for Better TFS”.

<rant>

I was trying to run the TfsConfig tool and I kept getting the message:

“TF55038: You don't have sufficient privileges to run this tool. Contact your Team Foundation system administrator."

This message made me think that it was something to do with the Install permissions as it is always recommended to use a single account to do every install of TFS. I did not install the original TFS on our network and my account was not used to do the TFS2010 install. But I did do the upgrade from 2010 beta 2 to 2010 RC with my current account.

So I proceeded to do some checking:

Am I in the administrators group on the server?

Figure: Yes, I am in the administrators group on the server
Am I in the Administration Console users list?

Figure: Yes, I am in the Administration Console users list
Have I reapplied the permissions in the Administration Console users list ticking all the options?

Figure: Make sure you check all of the boxed if you want to have all the admin options

Figure: Yes, I have made sure that all my options are correct.
Am I in the Team Foundation administrators group?

Figure: Yes, I am in the Team Foundation Administrators group
Is my account explicitly SysAdmin on the Database server?

Figure: Yes, I do have explicit SysAdmin on the database

Can you guess what the problem was?

The command line window was not running as the administrator!

As with most other applications there should be an explicit error message that states:

"You are not currently running in administrator mode; please restart the command line with elevated privileges!"

This would have saved me 30 minutes, although I agree that I should change my name to Muppet and just be done with it.

</rant>

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,Administration,Team Foundation Server Admin Console,TFS Admin Console

Solution: Testing Web Services with MSTest on Team Build

Martin Hinshelwood — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:15:31 GMT

Guess what. About 20 minutes after I fixed the build, Allan broke it again!

Update: 4th March 2010 – After having huge problems getting this working I read Billy Wang’s post which showed me the light.

The problem here is that even though the test passes locally it will not during an Automated Build. When you send your tests to the build server it does not understand that you want to spin up the web site and run tests against that! When you run the test in Visual Studio it spins up the web site anyway, but would you expect your test to pass if you told the website not to spin up? Of course not. So, when you send the code to the build server you need to tell it what to spin up.

First, the best way to get the parameters you need is to right click on the method you want to test and select “Create Unit Test”. This will detect wither you are running in IIS or ASP.NET Development Server or None, and create the relevant tags.

~~Figure: Right clicking on “SaveDefaultProjectFile” will produce a context menu with “Create Unit tests…” on it.~~

~~If you use this option it will AutoDetect most of the Attributes that are required.~~

/// <summary>
///A test for SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.Services.IProfileService.SaveDefaultProjectFile
///</summary>
// TODO: Ensure that the UrlToTest attribute specifies a URL to an ASP.NET page (for example,
// http://.../Default.aspx). This is necessary for the unit test to be executed on the web server,
// whether you are testing a page, web service, or a WCF service.
[TestMethod()]
[HostType("ASP.NET")]
[AspNetDevelopmentServerHost("D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web", "/")]
[UrlToTest("http://localhost:3100/")]
[DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")]
public void SaveDefaultProjectFileTest()
{
    IProfileService target = new ProfileService(); // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value
    string strComputerName = string.Empty; // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value
    bool expected = false; // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value
    bool actual;
    actual = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile(strComputerName);
    Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual);
    Assert.Inconclusive("Verify the correctness of this test method.");
}

~~Figure: Auto created code that shows the attributes required to run correctly in IIS or in this case ASP.NET Development Server~~

~~If you are a purist and don’t like creating unit tests like this then you just need to add the three attributes manually.~~

HostType – This attribute specified what host to use. Its an extensibility point, so you could write your own. Or you could just use “ASP.NET”.
UrlToTest – This specifies the start URL. For most tests it does not matter which page you call, as long as it is a valid page otherwise your test may not run on the server, but may pass anyway.
AspNetDevelopmentServerHost – This is a nasty one, it is only used if you are using ASP.NET Development Host and is unnecessary if you are using IIS. This sets the host settings and the first value MUST be the physical path to the root of your web application.

OK, so all that was rubbish and I could not get anything working using the MSDN documentation. Google provided very little help until I ran into Billy Wang’s post and I heard that heavenly music that all developers hear when understanding dawns that what they have been doing up until now is just plain stupid.

I am sure that the above will work when I am doing Web Unit Tests, but there is a much easier way when doing web services.

You need to add the AspNetDevelopmentServer attribute to your code. This will tell MSTest to spin up an ASP.NET Development server to host the service. Specify the path to the web application you want to use.

[AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", "D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")]
[DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")]
[TestMethod]
public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True()
{
    ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient();

    bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav");

    Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue);
}

Figure: This AspNetDevelopmentServer will make sure that the specified web application is launched.

Now we can run the test and have it pass, but if the dynamically assigned ASP.NET Development server port changes what happens to the details in your app.config that was generated when creating a reference to the web service? Well, it would be wrong and the test would fail.

This is where Billy’s helper method comes in. Once you have created an instance of your service call, and it has loaded the config, but before you make any calls to it you need to go in and dynamically set the Endpoint address to the same address as your dynamically hosted Web Application.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Reflection;
using System.ServiceModel.Description;
using System.ServiceModel;

namespace SSW.SQLDeploy.Test
{
    class WcfWebServiceHelper
    {

        public static bool TryUrlRedirection(object client, TestContext context, string identifier)
        {
            bool result = true; 
            try { 
                PropertyInfo property = client.GetType().GetProperty("Endpoint");
                string webServer = context.Properties[string.Format("AspNetDevelopmentServer.{0}", identifier)].ToString(); 
                Uri webServerUri = new Uri(webServer); 
                ServiceEndpoint endpoint = (ServiceEndpoint)property.GetValue(client, null); 
                EndpointAddressBuilder builder = new EndpointAddressBuilder(endpoint.Address); 
                builder.Uri = new Uri(endpoint.Address.Uri.OriginalString.Replace(endpoint.Address.Uri.Authority, webServerUri.Authority)); 
                endpoint.Address = builder.ToEndpointAddress(); 
            } 
            catch (Exception e) { 
                context.WriteLine(e.Message); result = false; 
            }
            return result;
        }
    }
}

Figure: This fixes a problem with the URL in your web.config not being the same as the dynamically hosted ASP.NET Development server port.

We can now add a call to this method after we created the Proxy object and change the Endpoint for the Service to the correct one. This process is wrapped in an assert as if it fails there is no point in continuing.

[AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")]
[DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")]
[TestMethod]
public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True()
{
    ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient();
    Assert.IsTrue(WcfWebServiceHelper.TryUrlRedirection(target, TestContext, "WebApp1"));

    bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav");

    Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue);
}

Figure: Editing the Endpoint from the app.config on the fly to match the dynamically hosted ASP.NET Development Server URL and port is now easy.

As you can imagine AspNetDevelopmentServer poses some problems of you have multiple developers. What are the chances of everyone using the same location to store the source? What about if you are using a build server, how do you tell MSTest where to look for the files?

To the rescue is a property called" “%PathToWebRoot%” which is always right on the build server. It will always point to your build drop folder for your solutions web sites. Which will be “\\tfs.ssw.com.au\BuildDrop\[BuildName]\Debug\_PrecompiledWeb\” or whatever your build drop location is. So lets change the code above to add this.

[AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", "%PathToWebRoot%\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")]
[DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")]
[TestMethod]
public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True()
{
    ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient();
    Assert.IsTrue(WcfWebServiceHelper.TryUrlRedirection(target, TestContext, "WebApp1"));

    bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav");

    Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue);
}

Figure: Adding %PathToWebRoot% to the AspNetDevelopmentServer path makes it work everywhere.

Now we have another problem… this will ONLY run on the build server and will fail locally as %PathToWebRoot%’s default value is “C:\Users\[profile]\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects”. Well this sucks… How do we get the test to run on any build server and any developer laptop.

Open “Tools | Options | Test Tools | Test Execution” in Visual Studio and you will see a field called “Web application root directory”. This is where you override that default above.

Figure: You can override the default website location for tests.

In my case I would put in “D:\Workspaces\SSW\SSW\SqlDeploy\DEV\Main” and all the developers working with this branch would put in the folder that they have mapped.

Can you see a problem?

What is I create a “$/SSW/SqlDeploy/DEV/34567” branch from Main and I want to run tests in there. Well… I would have to change the value above. This is not ideal, but as you can put your projects anywhere on a computer, it has to be done.

Conclusion

Although this looks convoluted and complicated there are real problems being solved here that mean that you have a test ANYWHERE solution. Any build server, any Developer workstation.

Resources:

http://billwg.blogspot.com/2009/06/testing-wcf-web-services.html

~~http://tough-to-find.blogspot.com/2008/04/testing-asmx-web-services-in-visual.html~~

~~http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms243399(VS.100).aspx~~

~~http://blogs.msdn.com/dscruggs/archive/2008/09/29/web-tests-unit-tests-the-asp-net-development-server-and-code-coverage.aspx~~

~~http://www.5z5.com/News/?543f8bc8b36b174f~~

Technorati Tags: VS2010,MSTest,Team Build 2010,Team Build,Visual Studio,Visual Studio 2010,Visual Studio ALM,Team Test,Team Test 2010

Need Help?

SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice.

Team Foundation Server

SSW provides expert Visual Studio ALM guidance including installation, configuration and customisation through our four Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP’s in three countries; Australia, Beijing and the UK. They have experience deploying to small development shops all the way through to large blue chips.

Professional Scrum Developer Training

SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

Solution: Getting Silverlight to build on Team Build 2010 RC

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:46:08 GMT

This is SSW’s first time using Team Build 2010 to automatically create a Silverlight application. In the past the guys have used Cruse Control, but we want to move to a pure TFS 2010 solution. When one of our developers (Allan) added a Silverlight 3 project to the Solution our build server spat it out.

Figure: Build SSW.SqlDeploy_20100303.8 failed when trying to build a Silverlight application.

Usually the person who broke the build should now be the one responsible for babysitting it until the next person breaks the build. In this case we had not agreed that as part of our project prep so I think I will need to wait until the retrospective at the end of our current, and first for this project, sprint.

Problem 1: First time for Silverlight compile on the Build Server.

Because Allan added the first Silverlight 3 application to the Solution the build server hiccupped as only the Silverlight 2 SDK was installed on it and it was a Silverlight 3 project. I have highlighted below where the problem was located.

Figure: The Silverlight targets file was not found on the build server.

I downloaded and installed the Silverlight 3 SDK from Microsoft, and hoped all would be well.

But the build failed again…

Figure: SSW.SqlDeploy_20100303.10 failed still trying to find targets.

Problem 2: This was due to the web targets not being installed.

At this point I got fed up and copied the contents of my local directory “C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0” to the same folder on the build server.

Figure: MSBuild could not find the web targets.

But the build failed again…

Figure: SSW.SqlDeploy_20100303.11 failed again trying to build Silverlight.

Problem 3: Can’t build Silverlight 3 projects with MSBuild 64-bit (the default)

There is a nasty bug in the Silverlight SDK that means that you can’t build using the MSBuild 64-bit process. But on a 64-bit OS, the 64-bit MSBuild is used by default… so how to change it.

Figure: Why is it saying that the SDK is not installed… oh, a bug.

This is an easy fix, but a hard to find solution. if you Open up your “build process definition” and expand the Advanced tree you will see that there is a MSBuild Platform option that is set to “Auto”, change this to “X86”.

Figure: You MUST set the MSBuild Platform to X86 to build a Silverlight project,

And the build failed again…

Figure: SSW.SqlDeploy_20100304.04 failed again trying to do code analysis.
Note: This was only run 20 or so minutes after the last build, but my build server happens to be in Australia :)

Problem 4: Can’t run Code Analysis on Build Server

Now I get Code Analysis errors…

Figure: Why would I be getting code analysis errors? Could it be that it is not installed?

To fix this one I just bit the bullet and installed Visual Studio 2010 onto the Build server, and…

Figure: Successful builds give me a warm fuzzy feeling…

Conclusion

The things that should be installed on the build server are:

Team Foundation Build Services 2010 or 2008 or 2005
Visual Studio 2010/2008/2005
Add-on’s for TFS or Visual Studio that may be required to execute the build.

The options you should set for any Build that has 32-bit dependencies that are causing a problem:

You MUST set the MSBuild Platform to X86 to build a project that can’t be built in 64-bit MSBuild.

Technorati Tags: Team Build,TFS2010,TB2010,MSBuild,Silverlight,Team Build 2010

Need Help?

SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice.

Team Foundation Server

Professional Scrum Developer Training

SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

Upgrading from TFS 2010 Beta 2 to TFS 2010 RC done

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:55:34 GMT

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 RC was released yesterday on MSDN. I am happy to report that today we successfully completed upgrading our production TFS 2010 Beta 2 server, to the new TFS 2010 RC. wow.

Updated: 2009-02-11 – Added link to Brian Harry’s post
Updated: 2009-02-12 – Adam Cogan was not clear that there were two problems with snapshoting running servers.

The upgrade was smooth, let me tell you the steps:

note: If you are upgrading from TFS 2008 you can follow our Rules to better TFS 2010 Migration

Snapshot the hyper-v server
There are two reasons why you should never do this while the server is running:
1. It’s Slow - Make sure you turn off your server before you take a snapshot. It took 15 minutes to get to 2% while the server was running, but turning it off had the whole operation completed in under 30 seconds. I think of this as very like the feature of Linux that let you recompile the kernel on the fly to avoid rebooting when adding drivers: Nice to have, but only if you have 10 hours to spare.
2. It’s Dangerous - Brian Harry has an even better reason why you should never snapshot a running server.
Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 Beta 2
You will need to uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 client bits that you have on the server. That's a no brainer, but you can remove them early to streamline your installation process
Uninstall TFS 2010 Beta 2
Install TFS 2010 RC
Configure TFS 2010 RC
Pick the Upgrade option and point it at your existing “tfs_Configuration” database to load all of the existing settings
Test the server

All of our 52 developers are now up and running on TFS 2010 RC. Well…almost all. A couple of guys reported this problem even though they had previously connected to TFS 2010 Beta 2:

If you get this error on the VS 2008 client after the upgrade, you should check whether you have KB74558 installed, if not you can download it manually or run diagnostics to ensure your entire system is up to date.

Figure: Error TF31001 or TF253022, but why is that link not clickable.

Figure: Check that you have the update so you can connect to TFS 2010 via “Help | About Microsoft Visual Studio”

I will be ironing out any other kinks tomorrow…

Next steps includes upgrading our build servers and moving all 52 developers over to Visual Studio 2010.

We were the first company on Beta 2 in production and I believe we are first on RC in production.

Technorati Tags: VS2010,TFS2010,Visual Studio 2010,Team Foundation Server 2010,Visual Studio,Team Foundation Server

Need Help?

SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice.

Team Foundation Server

Professional Scrum Developer Training

SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

Outlook 2010 Beta 2 and Add-Ins: Dynamics CRM, Team Companion, LinkedIn and Plaxo

Martin Hinshelwood (SSW) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:05:32 GMT

At SSW we are extensive users of Dynamics CRM. I wanted to give Office 2010 a go, but I had to make sure that the Dynamics CRM plug-in, and my other plug-ins worked.

You would think that support for Office 2010 Beta 2 was poor! You would be right and wrong…

I use a number of plug-ins for outlook:

LinkedIn
Plaxo
Team Companion
Dynamics CRM

All of them work…to an extent…

Figure: Screenshot of outlook with add-ins

Outlook 2010 put all of the Add-ins into a single tab called “Add-Ins” and they just get stacked up, which is bad!

Figure: Close up of the LinkedIn, Plaxo and Team Companion Add-ins

Can you see the problem? No? Well, the ribbon bar is only so tall, so that makes for 3 and only 3 add-ins. Where is the Dynamics CRM add-in? Can you see it in the first image? No! Let me help you.

Figure: Where is ~~Wally~~ Dynamics CRM4 Add-in?

This looks useless, and it would be if the same options were not also available as a pull down menu.

Figure: Dynamics CRM4 pull down menu in Office 2010 have all the bits you need, even if you can’t get to the buttons.

The story is a little better when you open an email. The options for Dynamics CRM are prominent, as are the Team Companion and LinkedIn options.

Figure: Shows the Team Companion, LinkedIn and CRM options on an email; this is a much better format.

So, what else do you need to know? No 64-bit support yet, so you need to use Outlook 32-bit, and if you need to use Outlook 32-bit then you MUST use Office 32-bit:

CRM4 will not Install if Office 2010 is installed
Workaround: http://bovoweb.blogspot.com/2009/10/ms-outlook-2010-and-dynamics-crm.html
If you upgrade Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2010 CRM will work
http://dario.blog.viadis.hr/2009/07/outlook-2010-dynamics-crm-40-client.html
You MUST use the 32bit version of Outlook 2010
http://halo76.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/office-2010-and-crm-4-0-for-outlook-32-bit-only/
If you are using Outlook 2010 32bit, the rest of the Office 2010 bits that you install must be of the same bitness
http://blogs.msdn.com/officedevdocs/archive/2009/11/25/developing-outlook-2010-solutions-for-32-bit-and-64-bit-systems.aspx

This post also answers the question of wither you can move to Office 64-bit now? The answer is yes, unless you have any add-ins that you depend on and that do not work in Outlook 64-bit. If you do, you are in a bit of a pickle… Wait for support, or better yet, pester the Product team that makes your add-in to get it to support 64-bit office.

To Dynamics CRM Team, Plaxo Team, LinkedIn Team, TeamCompanion Team

Please can you:

fix add-in to work with Outlook 64-bit (Team Companion guys are already on the case showing the rest of you up)
fix add-in to have a ribbon tab like the Visual Studio ALM Add-in in Excel.

Technorati Tags: Dynamics CRM,Plaxo,LinkedIn,Team Companion,Office 2010,Outlook 2010,Outlook 2010 64-bit,64-bit,32-bit

Installing Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1

Martin Hinshelwood (DyslexicDev) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:54:28 GMT

I have been trying since SP1 was released to get it installed at Aggreko, but due to our global, three time zones, development team and release schedules it has been very difficult to get some time set aside for it.

Now that I am leaving, last day is Tuesday 17th November, there was more of an apatite to take the hit on time and get it installed.

While I may be late to the game for SP1, I was conscious that a lot of gotchas around the installation had been reported when it was released.

You can find a full list on Brian Harry's blog on his Problems installing TFS SP1 post, but I have to say that I have never had an install, except maybe 2010, go more smoothly. Its always the same when you take lots of precautions for Murphy's Law to rear its head, nothing goes wrong ;).

We have a single virtual server instance of TFS with the only architectural customisation is the link between TFS and our corporate MOSS environment.

Release Plan

~~Turn off remote access to TFS websites~~
~~Verify access to TFS is not possible remotely~~
~~Run full SQL backup~~
~~Take a snapshot (VM Ware) of the TFS server [Infrastructure Team]~~
~~Install VS2008 SP1 if client installed~~
~~Install TFS2008 Service Pack 1~~
If any problems are encountered refer to Brian Harry’s post on resolving SP1 install issues: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/comments/1627061.aspx
~~Follow test plan~~
If tests fail, follow back out plan
~~Done~~

Test Plan

~~Check event log for errors~~
~~Check all services are running~~
~~Test web access~~
~~Test Visual Studio Access~~

Back out Plan

1. Restore last snapshot

2. Start TFS website in IIS

3. Test TFS Services by connecting through Visual Studio 2005 / 2008

4. Test Web Access (http://tfs01.northwind.com)

Conclusion

Although there seemed to be a lot of noise around the time that SP1 was released, the great god Murphy left me alone in this instance. It just goes to show, simpler is better...

Technorati Tags: TFS2008,SP1,TFS2008 SP1,Team Foundation Server,VSTS

Deploying Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 2 - Done

Martin Hinshelwood — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:46:44 GMT

Well, nothing like hitting the ground running, my first job at SSW was to join the TFS Migration Team, it was a fun experience, let me tell you how it went.

Update #1 20th January 2010: Have a look at our Rules to better TFS2010 Migration

Adam put a few guys together:

Adam Cogan (Australia) – The team lead who checks everything and makes us follow the rules to better TFS.
Eric Phan (Australia) – Created an excellent "Rules to a successful migration from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 guide”
Justin King (Australia) – Justin seems to play the part of devil’s advocate. I looked him up in the company directory and he is a previous employee…I guess you never really leave SSW.
Me (Scotland) – The implementer
Allan Zhou (Beijing) – My co-conspirator for the implementation

We started at 2:30am (GMT+1) on Saturday morning and we did it in 5 major steps:

Backed up TFS 2008 databases (Some 14GB of data)
Restored databases to new 64 bit server
Installed TFS 2010 Beta 2 64 bit
Run the Upgrade of 2008 data to 2010 Beta 2
Tested the deployment

We completed the migration at 9:15am (GMT+1) on Saturday morning so all in the migration took just less than 7 hours.

Figure: Web Access – Working

Figure: Visual Studio - Working

Well done to the SSW team.

Well done also to the guys involved in the TFS team, the same migration from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008 was a much more painful experience taking days of work, but the guys from SSW made this process easy and straight forward…Preparation does that for a project…

A possible claim to fame: In addition we might have been the first company (SSW is a company of 52 employees and contractors) to migrate. So far I have not seen any blog posts about other companies migrating everything over to Beta 2. I am a TFS MVP and no-one on that list has posted about a migration yet (I can just imagine Justin King having another fit when he finds that out).

Technorati Tags: TFS2010,TFS2008,Team Foundation Server,Microsoft ALM,ALM,Visual Studio ALM

Need Help?

SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice.

Team Foundation Server

Professional Scrum Developer Training

SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

A change for the better #2

Martin Hinshelwood (SSW) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:39:07 GMT

In the last 2+ years at Aggreko I have worked with Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and a number of WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET projects.

There had been some discussion of a new role within Aggreko in the solution architecture arena. I also spoke to Adam Cogan who has the title “SSW Chief Architect and Microsoft Regional Director”…

This fortuitous communication, which turned into an interview, resulted in an offer from Adam Cogan of employment as a Senior Software Architect at SSW…

I got through the interview and I decided to take a role at SSW…

If you know of Adam, then you will know that he has rules and standards for everything. If you have not heard of him, then I suggest that you have a read of those rules and see what they are all about.

The first set of rules that I read was the Rules to better Email and they helped me be more productive even before I accepted the job…

Check out rule #32 in SSW’s “Rules To Being Software Consultants Working In A Team”

#32 Do you enjoy your job?

The expectation from Adam is:

#1 is to put your heart into your job and enjoy yourself

Get your Employee Responsibilities (Scheduled recurring events) done

Improve SSW to a better place every week

Improve yourself to better person every week

If you find yourself not enjoying your job this is not necessarily a bad thing. You should make a commitment to give it a go and try to make it work. When you have decided you are unhappy you should talk to your boss and figure out what is making you unhappy. The fact is that there are some jobs that you are not suited to. It is probably best for everyone that you start to think about moving on and trying something that may make you happier.

I totally agree with this and at Aggreko I was supported by many people. I spoke to my boss Andre Vermeulen about the things I was not happy with, and we came to an understanding, but it is difficult for a large company to move at the same pace that I do. I found working with SharePoint 2003 is really just unacceptable.

In my new role at SSW I will be tasked with:

bringing SSW’s rules to European clients
helping organisations be more proactive with the Visual Studio 2010 ALM offering,
migrating TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 customers to the joys of TFS 2010
enabling SSW to have 24 hour operations

On top of this I will be using SharePoint 2010 and CRM 2005 in order to implement intranets and CRM for clients.

Its going to be a fun ride, and if you want to take your company to the next step and you are in Europe, please contact me.

Technorati Tags: SSW,Adam Cogan,Superior Software for Windows,Rules,Rules to Better

If you get a chance, check out SSW’s Rules. I am sure you will find something that will make you more productive and happier…

Configuring Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server on Vista in 12 minutes

Martin Hinshelwood (DyslexicDev) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:25:38 GMT

As Microsoft have separated Install with configuration, so I have separated my posts! You will need TFS2010 installed prior to the steps below.

This is my configuration experience...This wizard is excellent. If you had ever tried to install TFS in the past and it taken you a long time (took me 7 days the first time in 2005) Then you need to give this a go...

You can pick basic and it is...well...basic. It will install everything to the defaults.

I'm picking Advanced because I want to be able to select a pre-existing SQL Express instance...

You can enter a label if you want to have more than one TFS Configuration database in the same SQL instance.

If you are wanting to run on a network, maybe with an externally accessible URL, then you may need to pay attention to the security, but I don't really care for this install...

If you want to ever be able to connect Visual Studio 2005 clients to the server you MUST remove the virtual directory as Team Explorer 2005 will not be able to anything but the default collection.

Ok, I have a default collection, but only because I am lazy...

All done, now to apply it.

No, wait, we need to check all of the system requirements!

Now, usually this is the time to break out a cup of team, and maybe have a siesta. Lets see how long it takes...

..30 seconds...

...50 seconds...

.. 1 minute...

..Whoa, that was less than 2 minutes for the whole process.

Just to prove that this whole process took less than 12 minutes, here is the beginning and end of the log file:

[Info   @12:06:41.111] ====================================================================
[Info   @12:06:41.183] Team Foundation Server 2010 Administration Log
[Info   @12:06:41.186] Version  : 10.0.21006.1
[Info   @12:06:41.203] DateTime : 10/20/2009 13:06:41
[Info   @12:06:41.203] Type     : Configuration
[Info   @12:06:41.206] Activity : Deploy
[Info   @12:06:41.208] Area     : ApplicationTier
[Info   @12:06:41.216] User     : DOMAIN\martihins
[Info   @12:06:41.216] Machine  : ED0919
[Info   @12:06:41.229] System   : Microsoft Windows NT 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2 (AMD64)
[Info   @12:06:41.229] ====================================================================

... shortened ...

[Info   @12:18:28.147] Ending the Install operation on the ApplicationTier tier.

Whoa, that was fast! Compared to previous versions I was done before I started, like crossing an international date line. Another one is... no documentation... nope, I didn't look at it once! I would not recommend this approach, at least have a look to make sure you are installing the correct version on the correct URL's and to learn what the terms are.

P.S. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 any version without the Team Foundation Server 2010 compatibility pack WILL NOT CONNECT! The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 is available, but 2005 will not be available until RTM.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010

I should note that you should not complain about the limited support for 2005. Microsoft expects the install base to be less than 5% by the time Visual Studio 2010 is released, and they were not going to support it at all. That there is any support at all is due to the lobbying of the Team System MVP community and TAP customers and excelent communication with the product teams...

Technorati Tags: TFS,TFS2010,Team Foundation Server