Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Blog - by Neno Loje

Team Development and Software Quality with Microsofts ALM platform - since 2005

News

Recent Posts

Community

Tags

Email Notifications

VSTS Blogs

VSTS Sites

VSTS Community

My Other Blogs

German VSTS Websites

Archives

Browse by Tags

All Tags » Tips and Tricks (RSS)
Tip: How to shrink TeamCompanion’s ribbon commands
TeamCompanion , the popular Outlook plug-in for TFS, adds pretty wide command icons to Outlook’s mail window ribbon bar, as you can see here: Before: You can control it using the following registry entry: Key: HKCU\Software\Ekobit\TeamCompanion.Outlook...
Stop SQL Server transaction log (.LDF) files from growing indefinitely
Symptoms You notice that in your SQL databases directory the .LDF files are growing permanently. Solution Set the recovery mode of your SQL Server databases to 'simple'. Step-by-step instructions Perform a full-backup of your SQL Server databases...
See and possibly unlock files checked out by other team members
Ed Hintz points out that this is easily done with TFS Power Tools and wrote about it in 2007 . In the Source Control Explorer, right click on a parent folder that contains the pending change and choose, “ Find in Source Control ”. Choose " Status...
Customizing the folders and file extensions automatically excluded
When adding items to source control a list of excluded folders as well as file extensions is shown. You can customize those defaults in the registry. Matthew Mitrik has the details: If the add operation is successfully completed, the list will be saved...
Setting Remaining Work to Zero when closing a work item in TFS
Question : How can I make sure that the "Remaining Work" field is set to 0 when the work item is closed (for example when associating a work item during checking-in)? Short Answer : You can achieve this using the <COPY> rule on the transition...
Disable auto-connect to TFS on VS startup
When starting Visual Studio it automatically tries to connect to your TFS, which can be very annoying if you work offline. You will probably see: TF30331: Team Explorer could not connect to the Team Foundation server ... You can turn this auto-connect...
Naming Restrictions for Team Foundation Server
If you ever had questions like: How long is the team project's name allowed to be? How many levels may an work item area hierarchy have? Which characters are allowed in build type names ? What is the maximum supported size for work item attachments...
Setup up an e-mail notification on other user's check-ins
Open Alerts Editor (required TFS Power Tools to be installed locally). Create new alert. Choose “Check-In of a specific file happens”:     Enter a name for the alert subscription, the destination e-mail address , desired team project name (...
Tool for creating direct links to TSWA
Buck Hodges from Microsoft blogged about all the possible links you can construct to point to TSWA pages. For example the following URL opens the Work Item Editor: Open the existing work item with ID 1234: http://mytfs:8090/ wi .aspx? id = 1234 To make...
Discover users without Visual Studio SP1 installed
Far too often people install Visual Studio SP1 before Team Explorer 2008 and therefore TE remains unpatched in the RTM state. Luckily the ambitious TFS Admin can use the TFS Server Manager from the Power Tools package ( TfsServerManager.exe in the Power...
Specifying a user upfront or: How is the developer supposed to know who will be the responsible tester?
In a small team this sounds like oversize, but in mid-sized large teams it's common that you do not know who is going to be the tester. Looking at the Bug workflow from MSF Agile: while " Active " the project lead decided if and when the...
Using rich HTML descriptions instead of plain text
Objective Allow rich HTML formatting in description fields of the MSF Agile process template. Note : The MSF CMMI process does support HTML formatting by default. In order to use it you have to enable the formatting toolbar (see Step 6 below). Work Item...
How to revert changes checked into TFS Version Control
Objective We did some changes to a file and now want to revert to an older version of that same file. In the concrete scenario we added a method called "Multiply" with changeset 8 and want to go back to the version of changeset 7. Step-By-Step...
Q: How do I switch Team System Web Access back to English?
Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 comes equipped with 10 languages for its UI that will be displayed depending on your Internet browsers regional settings. You can set a language - independently what your browser settings by opening the Options dialog from...
Turn off label deletion when deleting builds
By default a build label is deleted when the corresponding build gets deleted. In TFS 2008 SP1 you can change that behavior by modifying the web.config file (on the TFS AT in folder %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Web...
Adding TFS tools to your path environment variable
For easier access to the various command line tools of TFS you can add the necessary directories to your %PATH% environment variable. Paths to add (on a TFS client ) Drive: \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE Paths to add (on a TFS...
Q: How do I disable the Team Members feature of TFPT?
A: You can disable it from the options dialog, however this does not remove it entirely (as described here ). To turn it off completely you need to additonally set the following value in the registry: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation...
Q: How can I exclude a file from code churn?
A: You can change it's encoding in version control to Binary . Background: The code churn value used by TFS report, like the Quality Indicators report, might not make any sense to you if files this value includes some specific files, like auto-generated...
VS & TFS SP1 - What to apply on which machine
Often the questions is raised which service pack applies to which VSTS/TFS component: Machine TFS SP1 VS SP1 TFS single server / TFS Application Tier Yes Yes, if Visual Studio is installed. Install this prior to TFS SP1. TFS Data Tier No No Team System...
A very Basic Process Template to start with
If you want to start small with your team project you might consider the "Basic Process Template" instead of the built-in MSF Agile and MSF CMMI process templates. It can find on MSDN . From the description: The basic process template includes...
More Posts Next page »