Yesterday Microsoft announced the aquisition of Teamprise, the company providing access to TFS from other platforms and IDE. I think it’s great that Microsoft will provide a complete solution so hopefully this will make it even more natural to use TFS in an heterogenous development environment.
According to Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet, the former Teamprise tools will be available as part of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or as a separate package;
New users will be able to buy Team Foundation Server plus Teamprise shipped as a single package. The bundle will be offered as part of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate SKU or at retail for approximately $799.
Reference: Microsoft 'builds a branch to Java developers" with Teamprise buy
So, just look at this beautiful picture showing the equivalent of Team Explorer running on Mac OSX:
Read the full press-release here: Microsoft Acquires Teamprise Assets, Provides Cross-Platform Support for Visual Studio.
Have you ever created a work item type and later on wanted to change the name to something different? Then you know the pain this will result in… Add new type definition, migrate data from old type to new (yes, most of that done by hand since work item ids change and so on) and finally delete the old work item type. Ohhh…
Now with TFS 2010 it is possible to rename a work item type definition. Using the command-line tool witadmin.exe you can specify the renamewitd argument followed by the details about the work item type to rename:
Excellent!
Recently Michel Perfetti finished up the work on a very useful work item control that lets you visualize the workflow of a work item. This is similar to the graphic view found in the Team System Web Access client but the custom control also has a nice grouping feature which further simplifies the analysis if a work items lifecycle.
The control looks like this:
Download the control and its source code from the Codeplex project TFSWorkflowControl.
If you are interested in how you can implement your own take a look at the Custom Controls for TFS Work Item Tracking project on Codeplex, which has several other controls in it as well as references to documentation on writing custom controls.
The short version is that TFS 2010 will support most of the clients used with TFS 2008 today.
There will be places where VS 2005/2008/2010 behave differently but for me it makes sense that 2005 and 2008 will work with their current feature set and only the latest features will be available in 2010.
One small noticeable difference in 2005 and 2008 is that the URL to TFS changes so that we can specify which project collection in TFS to connect to. The default collection (where all upgraded 2008 projects will be placed by default) would require the following setting in Team Explorer 2008:
For older clients to operate correctly with the new TFS version a “Forward Compatibility Update (GDR)” needs to be applied. In fact, in order to guarantee correct operation, TFS 2010 will block all unpatched clients. You can get the GDR for 2008 here: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010. Updates for 2005 and MSSCCI are coming later.
Read the detailed post “Compatibility Matrix for 2010 Beta 2 Team Foundation Server to Team Explorer 2008 and 2005” for all the info about the compatibility from different clients with TFS 2010.
Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released. It's very exciting to be able to start talking to people about the features in beta 2. A lot has changed since beta 1 and most importantly beta 2 comes with a "go-live" license which means we can actually start building production software using this version. See "Get ready to "go live" with Team Foundation Server 2010 beta 2!" in case you're wondering that "go-live" means.
There's also been a change in the SKUs for Visual Studio and the new editions for 2010 are:
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Professional
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Professional with MSDN
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Premium with MSDN
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® Test Elements 2010 with MSDN
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server 2010
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Lab Management 2010
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010
Sadly for us working the VSTS, the Team System brand has been dropped. But fortunately this doesn't mean that Microsoft is stepping back from the ALM space, instead all MSDN editions will include Team Foundation Server. And for teams who want to start working with TFS but not interested in documents in Sharepoint or reporting the TFS Basic edition will be a great starting point.
As an MSDN subscriber you can get beta 2 today and on Wednesday it will be made available on the Microsoft Download Center as well.
I've earlier posted about the new installation process, which really simplifies the way we setup TFS. With VSTS 2010 Beta 2 around the corner it's time to start planning for upgrade to TFS 2010 Beta 2 and then forward to RTM. This post is an overview of the overall process of upgrading a TFS 2008 server to TFS 2010. In coming posts I'll dig in to the key steps below in detail.
Requirements for TFS 2010
- Windows Server 2003 or 2008, 32- or 64-bit.
- SQL Server 2008
- WSS 3.0, 4.0, MOSS
Process
The following steps outline the overall upgrade process:
- Uninstall TFS 2008
- Upgrade to SQL Server 2008
- Upgrade to WSS 3.0 SP1 or SP2
- Install TFS. This will copy the bits from the installation media to the local machine.
Configure the features you want from the TFS admin console.
- Team Foundation Server
- Team Build Management
- Team Lab Management
Validate the upgrade
- SQL Server
- Reports
- Sharepoint
- Upgrade existing projects to take advantage of the new features in TFS 2010.
Brian Keller has posted more details on Go-Live with 2010 including links to a detailed checklist for rolling out TFS 2010.
I just received a mail from Ognjen Bajic at Ekobit that a new version of TeamCompanion is out.
From Ogy's blog:
Following is the list of the most important new and improved features of TeamCompanion in v2.2:
• Better offline support and support for occasionally connected clients
• Improved Work item edit form
• Improved Work item preview (Support for history; preview is now fully customizable)
• Improved Work item from Mail action
• Improved Open related object action – for emails multiple related objects are offered; related work item for Outlook Appointments
• Improved Reports support (new conversion formats for Reports; support for Canceling )
• Improved Send Work Item as Mail action ('with attachments' option including attaching created mail back to the Work Item)
• Improved usability/ease of use
• TFS 2010 Beta support
• TeamCompanion v2.2 is compatible with Windows 7
Read more in this blogpost.
Here a screenshot showing TeamCompanion nicely integrated in Office 2007:
Make sure to try it out, this is a really useful add-on to TFS!
TFS is a pretty large piece of software. To deploy a TFS instace will require knowledge of both TFS and the underlying infrastructure (SQL Server DBMS, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, Windows Sharepoint Services and so on), which makes it difficult for some companies to handle. Not all team require all the TFS features so dealing with the pre-requisites can be a big deal. The licensing model and its pricing has also been a pain in some segments.
Last night Brian Harry wrote a lenghty post about the latest addition to the TFS suite. In TFS 2010 we'll have the possibility to install a subset of the full TFS, which will not require Sharpoint or Reporting services. The installer in general is much improved in TFS 2010 but in this particual case it will be a "next, next, finish"-experience, it will install the required pre-requites if needed and do the necessary configuration. This means you should have TFS up and running in less than 30 minutes! And it will run on desktop operating systems as well.
Looking forward to beta 2...
I just found out that Telerik has just announced a new tool for visualizing work in TFS. The application is build with WPF and has a really slick UI:
Key features of the TFS Work Item Manager include:
- Work Item grid filtering, grouping, and aggregation
- Area and Iteration filtering using single and multi select modes
- Filter query results using a tree of areas or iterations
- Unique Task board view of work items independent from any process templatePrint work item cards for the board in your room
Iteration schedule
- Paste clipboard contents into a work item
- "New Query by example” saves your query for other team members
- Search the title and description of query results as you type
- Built with RadControls for WPF
There's also a configurable dashboard to go with this and both tools should work with the MSF project templates.
You can download the Telerik Tools for Team System here. And it's free!
Today I worked on a strange little behavior in the dialog used to create unit tests from code in Visual Studio 2008.
When I choose to create a new unit test the dialog displayed was completely empty:
After searching a bit on the Microsoft support website I found the reason; it turned out that there's a bug in VS 2008 Service Pack 1 that causes this effect when there's a Visual Studio 2008 GDR database project in the solution. Usually I keep the database project outside the main solution but in this case it was included and was causing the trouble. The problem occurs for these project types:
- A Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team System Database Edition General Distribution Release (GDR) project
- A Microsoft Silverlight project
- A Windows Installer XML (WIX) project
Fortunately there's a fix available that resolves this issue available here. So I installed and the dialog works fine again!
Last week QWise colleague Magnus Juvas and I presented at Microsoft "Sommarkollo" on the above subject.
We showed a bunch tools for agile practices, here are references to some of these so you can take a deeper look yourself:
Links
And for further readings links to the referenced literature:
Books
The presentation can be downloaded here (in Swedish).
For those of you interested in a deep-dive on the subject we're offering a two-day workshop. And I'm also presenting on a similar topic at Informator later this fall (in Gothenburg and Stockholm).
I've decided to move my old blog here. Why? Mainly because I'm lazy I think. I used to manage my blog myself. Not much work really, but still the issues of up-time, upgrades and all that good stuff. Another part of the lazy business comes from me wanting to use Word for blogging and I couldn't get the old software to like that idea very much. So far this blogging provider seems to deliver what I need so I hope I'll get around to writing a bit more than I have done lately.
So thanks to msmvps.com for providing space for yet another blog!