Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Blog - by Neno Loje : TFS Server Management

Naming Restrictions for Team Foundation Server

neno — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:39:38 GMT

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?

Those are answered by the MSDN topic: Naming Restrictions for Team Foundation Server

Reports for measuring TFS performance

neno — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:30:00 GMT

Grant Holliday, who runs the busiest TFS at Microsoft, posted 6 handy reports you can easily import into your TFS to monitor system performance.

"We have a responsibility to ensure that the server is performing as expected and to identify any efficiencies that can be made in the server or the tools. To do this, we have created a number of reports that we use ourselves and make available to our own users."

Link: Read the full story and download the Report Pack.

Discover users without Visual Studio SP1 installed

neno — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:30:00 GMT

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 Tools folder) to find those users without SP1:

Check for VS 2008 SP1 from the server

Open "Completed Requests" in TFS server manager.

Choose "devenv.exe, 9.0.21022.8" (= RTM), devenv.exe, 9.0.30729.1 stands for SP1.

Click "Run Query" and look at the User and Client IP columns to identity your colleagues:

Done!

Visual Studio (devenv.exe) Version Numbers:

devenv.exe 9.0.30729.1 – Visual Studio 2008 SP1
devenv.exe 9.0.21022.8 – Visual Studio 2008
devenv.exe 8.0.50727.762 – Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (?)
devenv.exe 8.0.?? – Visual Studio 2005

How many users can Team System Web Access support?

neno — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:21:31 GMT

A: Microsoft posted a white paper on this.

From the whitepaper:

"Test results indicate that Web Access starts to hit the upper limits once the total number of work item objects in the memory is around 180. This translates to approximately 100 concurrent users with typical usage patterns."

"Test results indicate that Web Access can support up to approximately 500 users." (working with a minimum amount of data)

Download: Team System Web Access 2008 Scalability Limits White Paper

How TFSDeleteProject Works

neno — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:42:43 GMT

There are some areas where data may remain behind after you use TFSDeleteProject.

The TFS Warehouse is untouched. In order to remove the data from the warehouse, it must be rebuilt. (It is important to notice that, when the warehouse is rebuilt all the historic build data that has been trimmed from the system will be removed.) Rebuilding the warehouse is accomplished using the command SetupWarehouse. For more information, see SetupWarehouse.
The build drop locations (i.e., the location where the build binaries, build log files, and test results log files are published during the build process) are untouched. Removing the build drops must be done manually.
Any work item tracking metadata that is shared between projects will not be deleted.
The version control shelve set may not be deleted if there is code in the shelve set from multiple projects.

Read the full story by Aaron Block.

Changing TFS emails to link to Team System Web Access – Part 2

neno — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:24:29 GMT

If you click on a hyperlink in an TFS notification mail the following (read-only) web page comes up instead of a nice looking Team System Web Access dialog. Let's change that!

Objective

Make sure all links in the notification mails sent by TFS point to Team System Web Access (TSWA) rather than the integrated read-only web pages from TFS.

There are fourareas to look at:

Work Item notification mails (has already been discussed here)
Build notification mails
Check-in notification mails
Mails sent by Team Explorer (feature of TFS 2008 SP1)

Area 1 is part of a separate blog post, for Area 2 there are currently no equivalent steps (as stated in KB956761). Areas 3 and 4 can be accomplished through the following steps:

Step 1: Specify TSWA Uri using tfsadminutil

Set TSWA uri (as described on MSDN):

tfsadminutil configureconnections /TSWAUri:http://MyTFS:8090/

Verify URIs:

tfsadminutil configureconnections

From now on all your check-in notification mails as well as mails sent via Team Explorer link to TSWA.

Unfortunately there's one problem if we look at the check-in notification mail we'll read:

"Details about his check-in were not available when this alert was prepared.
Select the link above to view more details about the check-in."

Microsoft released a hot fix to correct this behavior.

Step 2: Install hot fix

The hot fix is publically available at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB957196

Result

Way better, don't you think?

VS & TFS SP1 - What to apply on which machine

neno — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:50:43 GMT

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 Web Access (on separate machine)	No	Yes
TFS Build Server	Yes	Yes, if Visual Studio is installed. Install this prior to TFS SP1.
TFS Proxy	Yes	No
Visual Studio User	No	Yes
Office User	No	Yes

A very Basic Process Template to start with

neno — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:34:22 GMT

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:

one work item type: bug,
three queries: AllWorkItems, MyWorkItems, and MyWorkItemsAllTeamProjects,
a basic Windows SharePoint Services team portal (created from the default site template),
and a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services site that has the following reports on it: Builds, Bug Rates, Quality Indicators, Tests Failing Without Active Bugs and Load Test Summary.

Use this process template as a basic starting point and an alternative to the MSF for Agile Software Development or the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement templates.

Step 1: Upload the process template to your TFS

Step 2: Create a new team project (using the new process template)

Step 3: Discover what's been created

Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms194993(VS.80).aspx

How Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server internally

neno — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:02:23 GMT

A good read:

Applying Value Up at Microsoft by Sam Guckenheimer
(also available as 60-minute-webcast)
(see also: attached image about Scenarios, Value Props, Experiences, Features)
Managing work for Team System by Jeff Beehler
Internal TFS Usage: Tracking Customer Value by Siddharth Bathia
Dependency Management by Siddharth Bathia
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 1 (Our Process) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 2 (Feature Crews) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 3 (Implementing the Process) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 4 by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 5 (Tracking Progress) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 6 (Tracking multiple projects) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS - Chapter 6 (Addendum) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS-Chapter 7 (Tracking Risk) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/DevDiv uses TFS-Chapter 8 (Tracking Quality Gates) by Gregg Boer
How Microsoft/Dev Div uses TFS - Chapter 9 (Transparency in Reporting) by Gregg Boer

About the technical side:

Monitoring using the TFSServer Manager Power Tool by Brian Harry
Update on Microsofts TFS adoption by Brian Harry
July '08 DevDiv TFS Dogfood Statistics by Brian Harry
TFS statistics queries by Brian Harry

Facts about Running Builds in Parallel with Team Build

neno — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:57:02 GMT

TeamBuild

can build one build definition from a single Team Project at a time.
can build multiple build definitions from different Team Project.

MSBuild

has the capability to use multiple CPUs to build projects in parallel and therefore speed up your builds.
This multiproc feature can be leveraged in your Team Builds.

Thanks Grant for pointing out those facts.

Documentation on how to troubleshoot TFS issues

neno — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:45:23 GMT

Check the Windows Event Log.
Run TFS Best Practices Analyzer.
(part of the Power Tools, requires PowerShell to be installed first)
TFS-Team Explorer 2008 Troubleshooting Guide (@ MSDN Forums)
Have a look at the available troubleshooting documentation on MSDN:
For connection trouble have a look at:
Troubleshooting connections to TFS

What's the difference between Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007?

neno — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:42:59 GMT

The answer lies in a very detailed Excel sheet:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA101978031033.aspx?pid=CL100636421033

(Thanks to Richard for pointing me to it)

Documentation: Team Foundation Server SDK (online version)

neno — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:55:34 GMT

From the contents:

Team Foundation Server Extensibility

Team Foundation Server SDK Architecture

How to: Run Team Foundation Server SDK Samples

Team Foundation Core Services

Work Item Tracking Extensibility

Source Control Extensibility

Data Warehouse Extensibility

Reference for Team Foundation Server SDK

Link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb130146(VS.80).aspx

FIX: An unexpected error occurred while trying to add a web part to a project portal in TFS 2005

neno — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:42:00 GMT

Due to a lot of requests about this pretty common problem.

Steps you did:

You browsed for a web part:
You selected one and hit "Add":
You got the error message: "An unexpected error occurred."

This is a know issue with WSS 2.0 and a hot fix [1] can be requested at Microsoft which corrects this behavior.

I tried this with various customers and we could then successfully add new web parts after applying it.

Enjoy!

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915746/en-us

TFS 2008 Trials: How to extend the trial?

neno — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:01:00 GMT

Since Team Foundation Server 2008 was released end of November 2007 the early adopters which for some reasons have not obtained a product key yet are facing the problem of expiring trial licenses on their TFS servers.

I definitely recommend to find out when your TFS trial expires. You can use the Version Detector Tool [1], which Brian Harry [2] blogged about.

If you have trouble getting a product key in time:

From ten days before it expires you can extend the trial period for 30 additional days (using the tool mentioned above).
If that's not enough contact Microsoft to get additional 30 days.

Eventually people will check for the expiration date before they actually learn it the "hard way"...

So: don't be a fool, use the tool!

:-)

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/01/15/checking-your-tfs-version-and-extending-trials.aspx

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/techfellow/harry/default.mspx

Whitepaper: Operations Guidance for Team Foundation Server

neno — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:25:02 GMT

Summary: You can manage your deployment of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server more effectively if you create your own operations plan. As you create your plan, you should understand key elements of the architecture of Team Foundation Server and how your deployment topology affects operations. This white paper explains those elements in detail, so that you can avoid common problems with your deployment.

Contents

Overview

Understanding Your Team Foundation Server Topology

Managing Service Accounts

Managing Groups, Users, and Permissions

Managing Backup and Recovery

Managing Configuration Information

Monitoring Team Foundation Server

Creating an Operations Plan

Conclusion

Author Bio

Additional Information

Link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb663036(VS.80).aspx

Changing TFS email notifications to link to Team System Web Access

neno — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:44:37 GMT

Thanks to this MSDN Forums post I was able to change the link included in every TFS notification e-mail to point to TSWA instead of the project portal.

Here’s the full story:

When using project alerts to get notified about work item changes you get an email containing a link to the project portal:

If you follow the link you might get a bit dissapointed when looking at this very basic work item details page:

Since Team System Web Access is now avaible from Microsoft free of charge we can change the link in the template for all notification messages to point to the new TSWA.

Changing the e-mail template

On the TFS app tier open the folder:
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services\v1.0\Transforms
Create a backup of the file WorkItemChangedEvent.xsl, which we will be editing in the next step.
Replace the text:

<xsl:value-of select="DisplayUrl" />

with:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-before(DisplayUrl,':8080/WorkItemTracking/WorkItem.aspx?artifactMoniker='),':8090/wi.aspx?id=',substring-after(DisplayUrl,'artifactMoniker='))" />

The bold printed 8090 is the port where you installed TSWA at.
Save the file and you are done.

If you now get a new notification e-mail and click on the link you’ll see the following much nicer work item details form provided by TSWA:

Note: Be aware that you either need to use Windows authentication with TSWA to make this work or you need to be already logged in and the session must be still alive.

I published a 2nd part: Changing TFS emails to link to Team System Web Access – Part 2

How to remove someone else's workspace in TFS

neno — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:59:27 GMT

A customer asked:

“During my vacation my collegue was working on my machine and mapped the solution file to D:\Projects. Now I returned and wanted to map the solution to that folder as well, which obviously doesn’t work since it is already mapped.

How can I get rid of the workspace that my collegue has on my machine? (Since he won’t be working on my machine anymore it can be freely deleted.)”

First of all: you obviously need to be either the owner of the workspace or have the Administer workspaces permission on the Team Foundation Server to perform this.

Deleting a workspace using the command line

The command is:

tf workspace /delete [/server:servername] workspacename[;workspaceowner]

Source: MSDN

Deleting a workspace using GUI

If you prefer a rich UI you can use the free Team Foundation Sidekicks tool by Attrice Corp.

Hotfix for: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Adapter: An error occurred while processing changeset

neno — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:23:37 GMT

If you have the following error occurring every periodically when your warehouse is updated…

The description text is as follows:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: TFS Warehouse
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3000
Date:  nn/nn/nnnn
Time:  10:58:00
User:  N/A
Computer: Computer name
Description:
TF53010: An unexpected condition has occurred in a Team Foundation component. The information contained here should be made available to your site administrative staff.
Technical Information (for the administrative staff):
Date (UTC): 30.08.2007 08:58:00
Machine: Computer name
Application Domain: /LM/W3SVC/3/Root/Warehouse-3-128328371118437500
Assembly: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Warehouse, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a; v2.0.50727
Process Details:
Process Name: w3wp
Process Id: 3413
Thread Id: 4027
Account name: TFSService Account

Detailed Message: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Adapter: An error occurred while processing changeset ChangesetID, unexpected exception:
Exception Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. (type NullReferenceException)

Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Adapter.VCAdapter.persistChangesetInformation(FilePair fp, String sidForUserThatMadeChange, Boolean doOnlyRenameDebit)
   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Adapter.VCAdapter.processChangesets()

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

… there is help! Microsoft released a hot fix a few days ago:

FIX: When the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Adapter adapter processes a changeset, the adapter may fail in Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server
Get it at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940229/

Creating a separate work item form layout for Web Access

neno — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:32:00 GMT

Right now custom work item controls [1] are not supported by Team System Web Access [2]. Instead your custom control you will see this unpleasant message: “Unable to create workitem control ‘ControlName’”.

While this is a sad thing for us users does that mean that we shouldn’t use Web Access? No, of course not…

One solution is to create a separate work item form layout for Web Access and remove all custom controls from it. (thanks to Serkan and Marcus for pointing me in that direction.)

All you need to do is duplicate the <layout> information in your work item xml file.

Let’s do it

The first section gets a target-attribute with the value “WinForms” like this:

<Layout Target=“WinForms”>

The second targets the “Web”:

<Layout Target=”Web”>

Last thing you need to do is change the “Type” attributes of all controls in the web layout to use “FieldControl” instead of your custom control.

Review the results

If you take my Priority Control example from [1] it would look like this:

Windows layout (in Team Explorer) will show the friendly priority list (= the custom control):

Web layout in Team System Web Access doesn’t show the control, but instead it displays the regular field control. Not nice, but usable – and much better than the initial error message we had.

[1] http://msmvps.com/blogs/vstsblog/archive/2007/07/07/starting-using-custom-work-item-controls.aspx

[2] http://msmvps.com/blogs/vstsblog/archive/2007/08/27/free-add-on-team-system-web-access-tswa-power-tool-by-microsoft.aspx