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

TF30207: Can't create team project on TFS itself / red X on documents and reports / insufficient SSRS or WSS permissions

neno — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:16:37 GMT

Problem description

Team Project creation fails on the Team Foundation Server itself due to insufficient permissions although the user has all neccessary permissions in SQL Server Reporting Services (Content Manager role) as well as Windows SharePoint Services.

or

A red X is shown next to the Reports and Documents node when running Team Explorer on the Team Foundation Server itself.

Further obervations:

You can access http://<server>/reports without problems.
You can access the SharePoint Central Administration without problems.
Creating team projects with Team Explorer from other machines work fine.

Workaround

Follow the steps outlined in the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Customizing the folders and file extensions automatically excluded

neno — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:21:29 GMT

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 to the registry.

Order of finding masks to filter:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[Version]\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\AddOptions\ExcludeMasks
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[Version]\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\AddOptions\ExcludeMasks

(Thanks to Rich and Matt)

Recommendations for Virus Scanning on TFS computers

neno — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:59:39 GMT

Anti-virus software can badly impact the performance of your Team Foundation Server. Therefore make sure the following folders are excluded from scanning for viruses:

TFS Version Control Cache Folder
Team System Web Access Cache Folder
SQL database folders
SQL backup folders

Additionally Microsoft published virus scanning recommendations for:

(Thanks to Wes to pointing me at those three articles.)

Setting Remaining Work to Zero when closing a work item in TFS

neno — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:12:00 GMT

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 to the "Closed" state.

Step-by-Step instructions:

For the desired transition (in this example from "Active" to "Closed").
Add a field reference to "Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.RemainingWork"
Add a new rule of type "COPY"
Choose From = "value" and enter value = "0"
The resulting XML should look something like
Verification: After transitioning a task work item from "Active" to the "Closed" state "Remaining Work" is set to zero.

Disable auto-connect to TFS on VS startup

neno — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:56:00 GMT

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 behavior off by setting the following files in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation
"AutoLoadServer" = 0

Zero means do not reconnect automatically.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/hippietim/archive/2006/03/14/551320.aspx

Downside: you now always have to manually connect (from Team Explorer’s toolbar)

Download .REG file: NoAutoLoadServer.zip

P.S. The Team Foundation Power Tools (TFPT) include a feature called Tweak UI which offers a checkbox to set this registry key – however in the October 2008 version it has a bug (creaing a string value instead of DWORD) and therefore will not work.

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

Unable to publish test results from Visual Studio to TFS

neno — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:54:41 GMT

Error message similar to:

username@servername (mailto:username@servername) 2008-10-13 2:21:50 0.28 MB 10/13/2008 3:19:14 PM Failed Access to the path '\\DropFolder\Buildname_20080723.3\TestResults\fd8883e0-2153-44c6-8671-6d6db460c4a8\uesrname 2008-10-13 _02_21.trx' is denied.

Cause: Permission issue

A Workaround can be found in the KB article 958726.

What are Test Name, Test Id, and Test Path used for?

neno — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:49:05 GMT

If you create a work item out of a test result like this…

… the three test fields get populated by Visual Studio:

Read all details here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms194965.aspx

Using TFS to develop custom SharePoint applications (revised)

neno — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:11:05 GMT

The first article is created during a real world customer engagement and answers dozens of frequently asked questions and how-tos in a real world context vs. theoretical discussions. The 2^nd package addresses very common questions around setting up and using TFS features for a MOSS development project.

VSTS Rangers - SharePoint Server Custom Application Development: Document Workflow Management Project
Read about the real-world design, construction, and deployment of a custom SharePoint Server 2007 application to a mid-market enterprise customer using Team Foundation Server as an ALM platform.

VSTS Rangers - Using Team Foundation Server to Develop Custom SharePoint Products and Technologies Applications
Learn how to use TFS to support your SharePoint application development, and provide an integrated development environment and single source code repository for process activities, integrated progress reporting, and team roles.

Additionally to the existing guidance from Patterns & Practices the two teams worked together to align these stories:

patterns & practices: SharePoint Guidance

The SharePoint Guidance contains a sample implementation of an intranet application based on SharePoint Server 2007 that demonstrates solutions to many ALM challenges.

Setup up an e-mail notification on other user's check-ins

neno — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:19:19 GMT

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 ($/Teamproject), if applicable, as well as your account name (to be excluded).
The “Filter Expression” (2nd tab) looks now similar to:

'Artifacts/Artifact[starts-with(translate(@ServerItem, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"), "$/playground")]' <> null AND "Committer" <> 'TFS\neno'

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

Security Update for TSWA 2008 SP1

neno — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:47:58 GMT

From Hakan Eskici's blog:

A security issue has been identified with Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 and we have recently published an update that fixes it.

Installation Notice

Please note that this is a full release, so you will need to uninstall any existing versions of Web Access before installing this update.

Update: Instructions to patching your installation without the need to uninstall/reinstall TSWA)

Update #2: KB article 961267 is now available.

Determining if the update is installed

Take a look at the About page (Help > About) in Web Access.
The version number will be 9.0.3275 for TSWA 2008 SP1 Update.

Download: Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 Power Tool

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.

Specifying a user upfront or: How is the developer supposed to know who will be the responsible tester?

neno — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:00:00 GMT

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 bug is going to be fixed and assigns it to the responsible developer.
between "Active" and "Resolved" is where the developers implements the fix.
between "Resolved" and "Closed" is where the tester verifies the fix.

When the developer finishes coding he changes the state from "Active" to "Resolved", e.g. by checking in and associating the changeset with the work item.

But by doing so the work item is still assigned to him. In our scenario he doesn't know who will be the responsible tester to verify the fix. So who knows?

The project lead might have that information. So either we assign it back to the project lead to make him assign it to as tester or we make the project lead specify the tester upfront (with the ability to change it afterwards if necessary).

In this example we'll implement the second approach.

Objective

Ask for the Tester when creating the bug and automatically u.se it for the transition from "Active" to "Resolved"

Required Work Item Customization

Step 1: Add a new string field to hold the tester
In this example we will make it a required field (<required/>) and ensure that it contains a valid user (<validuser/>).

<FieldDefinition> type="String" name="Tester" refname="TeamSystemPro.Samples.Tester">
<REQUIRED />
<VALIDUSER />
</FieldDefinition>

Step 2: Add a rule to the transition from "Active" to "Resolved"
Automatically copy the value of the tester field to the Assigned to field.

<FieldReference refname="System.AssignedTo">
<COPY from="field" field="TeamSystemPro.Samples.Tester" />
</FieldReference>

Result

When creating a new bug it's now required to select a Tester before it can be saving.

When choosing "Resolved" for the state "Assigned to" will be automatically filled with the contents from the "Tester" field.

The history correctly shows the change in the "Assigned To" field from the developer (here: "Neno Loje" to the tester (in this case: "Administrator")

Happy Customizing!

Using TFS for non-development projects

neno — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Team Foundation Server is easily customizable and equipped with a general purpose workflow or state machine. So you might ask yourself: why not put a non-development or rather related process in TFS instead of using separate software.

Showcase #1: Lead Management

Since here at AIT TeamSystemPro Team we are TFS consultants we decided to not use a commercial CRM tool for managing our leads but rather customize a team project in TFS for this matter.

Here are a few impressions of the experience:

Work Item queries:

Work Item layout:

in Outlook (via TeamCompanion)

The pretty simple workflow behind it:

Showcase #2: Customer Support

Needless to say that the TFS support that we offer is tracked using work items as well:

Showcase #3: List of managed TFS instances

Every TFS instance that we manage has a corresponding record:

Your Feedback

Do you have an interesting idea or have you used your TFS to support a non-dev related process? Feel free to leave me a comment or use the contact link – thanks!

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?

Using rich HTML descriptions instead of plain text

neno — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:34:00 GMT

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 Customization

Step 1: Add a new HTML description field

Since the System.Description field is defined of type string as opposed to type HTML we need to create a new field:

Step 2: Change the work item layout

Use your own HTML field instead of System.Description

Step 3: Refresh Work Item cache

Right-click "Work Items" in Team Explorer and select "Refresh".

Step 4: Enable the formatting toolbar

Right-click on the Visual Studio toolbar, find and click "Formatting":

A new toolbar will appear:

Result

Click into the description field and use the toolbar to format your input:

Optional Step 5: Copying the old descriptions to the new HTML field

It would be a pity to loose the existing descriptions so let's write a small utility using the Team Foundation Object model to copy the "old" descriptions to the new HTML field:

static void CopyOldDescriptions()
{
    // TODO: Change these values:
    string tfsName = "servertogo";
    string tfsProjectName = "WorkItemCustomization";
    string tfsHtmlDescriptionFieldName = "DescriptionHtml";
    string tfsWorkItemType = "Task";

    using (TeamFoundationServer tfs = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer(tfsName))
    {
        WorkItemStore wit = (WorkItemStore)tfs.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));
        WorkItemCollection result = wit.Query(String.Format("SELECT [System.Id] FROM WorkItems WHERE [System.TeamProject] = '{0}' AND [System.WorkItemType] = '{1}'", tfsProjectName, tfsWorkItemType));
        List<WorkItem> affectedWorkItems = new List<WorkItem>();
        foreach (WorkItem wi in result)
        {
            if (wi.Description.Length > 0)
            {
                // Set new description
                string value = (string)wi[tfsHtmlDescriptionFieldName];
                if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(value))
                {
                    wi[tfsHtmlDescriptionFieldName] = wi.Description.Replace("\n", "<br>");
                }
                else
                {
                    wi[tfsHtmlDescriptionFieldName] += "<br><p>Old description:</p><p>" + wi.Description.Replace("\n", "<br>") + "</p>";
                }

                // Delete old description
                wi.Description = String.Empty;

                affectedWorkItems.Add(wi);
            }
        }

        if (affectedWorkItems.Count > 0)
        {
            wit.BatchSave(affectedWorkItems.ToArray());
            MessageBox.Show("Items updated: " + affectedWorkItems.Count);
        }
        else
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Nothing to do.");
        }
    }
}

Happy formatting. :-)

How to revert changes checked into TFS Version Control

neno — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:55:49 GMT

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 guide using the UI

Step 1: Get the version of the file you want to revert to into your workspace

Note: verify that the file really contains the version you expect and want to revert back to!

Step 2: Check out the file for editing

Note: You can freely specify a lock here to make sure none else checks in a new version of the file you are just trying to revert

Step 3: Check in the change you just made

Your check-in will generate a version conflict:

This conflict has to appear so that you don't accidently check in old stuff. You now have to confirm that you really want to override the version that is currently checked in with the older version in your workspace.

The conflict is now resolved:

The check-in was aborted due to the conflicts:

Step 4: Check-in again

Note: If you accidently reverted back to an old version you can use the same steps to open a newer version and upload this as the very latest version again.

Total: 20 clicks.

Alternative using the command-line tools (less clicks)

Instead of 20+ clicks you might think about automating these steps using TF.exe – and are down to 5 commands.

tf get MyClass.cs /version:C8
tf checkout MyClass.cs
tf checkin /noprompt /validate
tf resolve /auto:AcceptYours
tf checkin /comment:"Reverting to older version!" /noprompt

Here's ready to use batch file, which takes two parameters:

%1: Name of the file you want to revert.
%2: Version of the file, e.g. if changeset number when C7 stands for changeset 7

Although we use command line commands the check in dialog will pop up to allow us to specify check-in comments, notes and associate work items.

Download: RevertScript.zip