Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Blog - by Neno Loje : Team System Web Access (TSWA)

TSWA: Report view not showing all work items

neno — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:01:00 GMT

If you have more than 100 work items in a query and you use Tools » Report View to prepare the list for printing you might notice that not all work items are shown on the report.

Here’s what Hakan Eskici, the father of Web Access, has to say about this:

There’s a limit to the number of work items we display in the “report view” for performance reasons. By default, it’s set to 100, but you can increase this by changing the following line in the web.config file:

<maxWorkitemsInReportList count="100"/>

Enjoy!

Cannot download attachements from Work Item Web Access

neno — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:22:00 GMT

Solution provided by Hakan Eskici from Microsoft:

If you are using the WIWA feature in the latest TSWA 2008 SP1, you may notice that it’s not possible to download attachment files from the work item window.

As a workaround, you can edit Wiwa\UI\Pages\WorkItems\DownloadAttachment.aspx and modify the page directive to fix this by adding the HasPermission attribute:

<%@ Page Language="C#"
        AutoEventWireup="true"
        MasterPageFile="~/UI/Masters/Window.master"
        Inherits="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WebAccess.UI.Pages.WorkItems.DownloadAttachment"
        Codebehind="DownloadAttachment.aspx.cs"
HasPermission="true" %>

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2009/02/13/fix-wiwa-cannot-download-attachments.aspx

Tool for creating direct links to TSWA

neno — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:38:55 GMT

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 it simple I created a small tool that helps you construct those URLs in an easy way:

You can download the source from here:

File Attachement: WebAccessLinkCreator.zip

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

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?

Be aware: don't use underscores in server names

neno — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:07:53 GMT

An underscore ("_") is not a supported character for a server name according to the RFC standards and therefore Windows will warn you when trying to use it as part of a DNS name.

Symptoms

ASP.NET applications that use session state, like Team System Web Access, will work when invoked using the IP (http://1.1.1.1:8090/) but will fail after some crazy redirecting with a DNS error when using the server name (http://my_tfs:8090/).

Workaround

You can add a DNS alias and avoid using underscores in server names in the future.

(Thanks to Hakan Eskici from Microsoft for pointing this out.)

Update: Hakan now blogged about this: Strange TSWA connection issue if the server name contains an underscore character.

Update #2: Microsoft published KB article 968549 about this.

Q: How do I switch Team System Web Access back to English?

neno — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:10:10 GMT

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 the Settings menu.

and choosing your preferred language on the "Regional settings" tab.

TFS Tip: Enabling Work Item meta data filtering

neno — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:45:54 GMT

Beginning with TFS 2008 SP1 you can specify that only the necessary part of the Work Item meta data will be transferred to the client caches, e.g. not the meta data for project you have no permission on. This is not done by default.

You can read all the glory details in Martin Woodward's blog. Short excerpt:

Enabling WIT Meta-data filtering

Now that we have been through all the gory details, let's finally see how to switch on the feature.
In the appSettings section of the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\WorkItemTracking\web.config file add the following keys
   1: <add key ="filterClientMetadata" value="true"/>
   2: <add key ="excludedUserAgents" value="WebAccess:w3wp:witfields:witimport:witexport:witadmin"/>
The filterClientMetadata switch determines whether to filter client metadata based on the calling user's access rights (true) or not (false). If not provided the setting will default to false.
The excludedUserAgents switch is a colon delimitated list of strings that may appear in the requested clients HttpRequest UserAgent header. You can take a look at your IIS logs or your TFS Activity logs to determine what user agents are used, but a handy feature of the TFS .NET API is that the executable name using the API is recorded in the user agent string, meaning that you can easily find your specific utility and exclude it if necessary. As far as I am aware, the only publically accessible application that makes use of shared meta-data is Team System Web Access, so we put "WebAccess" in our excluded user agents setting. We also put in the names of the utilities in Team System that need to see all the metadata to report back correct information to the TFS administrators.

Using images in description fields

neno — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:44:38 GMT

Requires:

The use of HTML description fields in stead of the default description field.
Team System Web Access (TSWA) to insert the pictures.

Steps:

Use a HTML fields for your descriptions instead of plan text fields
(might need to copy the old descriptions programmatically).
Add the image you want to use to the work item's attachments:
Save the Work Item.
Double-click your attachment. IE opens. Copy the URL to the attachment to the clipboard.
Open the Work Item in Team System Web Access and use the "Insert Images" bottom (from the toolbar within the HTML field):
Paste the attachment-URL from clipboard:
Save the Work Item.
Done. You can see your picture in the HTML description field.

TSWA:

Team Explorer:

Screen Gallery: Installing Team System Web Access (TSWA) 2008

neno — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:27:03 GMT

Screenshots of a successful Team System Web Access (TSWA) installation.

Requires: Team Explorer 2008 to be installed.

Open TSWA to verify it's working:

Method not found: 'Void Microsoft.Reporting.PreviewItemContext.SetPath()' when using Report View in TSWA

neno — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:46:00 GMT

If you get the following error message above when using the Report View in Team System Web Access…

… you need to install the Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2005 on your TFS App Tier (as described here) to make it work again.

How it looks when it works

Open a work item or a execute a work item query.
Click “Tools” > “Report View”
This report should appear now:

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

Tool for creating links to pages on Team System Web Access

neno — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:34:20 GMT

Would you like to send links to work items, team projects or source files on Team System Web Access?

For work items
… you can find the answer in the offical TSWA FAQ:

Q: What’s the URL to use if I want to send the link of a specific work item?

A: Work item links use the follwing format:

http://[TSWA:port]/wi.aspx?id=[WorkItemID]

For Team Projects
… it also pretty simple:

http://[TSWA:port]/index.aspx?pname=[ProjectName]

For Source Files
… it’s a little bit more “interesting” (thanks to Hakan from Microsoft for reveiling the details behind this secret).

It’s a bit tricky but here it goes:

http://[TSWA:port]/UI/Pages/Scc/ViewSource.aspx?scc-item=[ItemData]

ItemData is the HtmlEncoded output of the query string something like “id=10&cs=-1”

id: the ID of the item in source control (you need to know this instead of the file path)

cs: changeset number (-1: latest)

In your example, the file id is 151611. So,

HtmlEncode(“id=151611&cs=-1”) -> “id%3D151611%26cs%3D-1”

https://[TSWA:port]/UI/Pages/Scc/ViewSource.aspx?scc-item=id%3D151611%26cs%3D-1

[We’re planning to provide more friendly URLs in a future version, similar to wi.aspx approach]

To make it fast and more convenient to create links to TSWA I created a small tool to help you with it:

It should be mentioned that this tool has a lot of room for improvement. :-)

You can download the source from an updated version here.

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

Listing version control changes with check-in comments using TFS

neno — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:36:34 GMT

You can easily query for changes on a team project or a specified version control folder underneath and display them in a list with the check-in comments.

By using Team System Web Access (TSWA):

Note: I’m showing this first because the dialog is very comfortable, e.g. you can filter by user or time range.

In TSWA on the “Source” tab, right-click any folder (team project folder or sub-folder) and select “Find Changesets”.
In the “Find Changesets” dialog, select the desired filter criteria and confirm with “Find” to generate a list of changesets with check-in comments.

By using Visual Studio Team Explorer:

In Team Explorer under “Source Control”, right-click any folder and choose “View History” from the context menu.
The “History” window is shown with a list of all changesets (again with check-in comments) of the folder and sub-folders, which – as far as I know – cannot be filtered further.

By using Team Foundation Sidekicks (a free tool by Attrice):

Start Team Foundation Sidekicks and open the History Sidekick by clicking on the third toolbar button (the clock with an arrow on it).
On the left side, select a folder by clicking on it.
On the right side in the “History” tab you will see the changes with an option to filter them by user.

Enabling email functionality in Team System Web Access (TSWA)

neno — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:28:42 GMT

By default, the email functionality in Team System Web Access (TSWA) is disabled and users will receive the following message when trying to use it:

“Sending email is not enabled. Please contact your administrator.”

To enable you need to change TSWA’s web.config file, which can be found under %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System Web Access\Web.

Change the setting “sendingEmailEnabled” to true.
And specify your SMTP server name under “host”.

Optionally you can specify which account to use when authenticating with the SMTP server and if SSL should be enabled as well as the default email address for the sender.

Where can you use the email functionality?

You can send…

single work items (from the work item form)
multiple work items, i.e. the result of a work item query

The email function can be found in the “Tools” menu.

The “Send Email” window allows you to specify the sender’s (“From”) and receiver’s (“To”) email address, as well as subject and message.

After hitting send a message box confirms that the mail was successfully routed to the email server.

This is how the receiver will see the message if it’s about a single work item:

… or about a work item query result:

Free Add-On: Team System Web Access (TSWA) Power Tool by Microsoft

neno — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:10:07 GMT

Microsoft now offers version 2.0 of the Team System Web Access (formerly known as TeamPlain Web Access from DevBiz, which was acquired by Microsoft ) free of charge as a Power Tool with official Microsoft Customer Service support!

Download it from here.

Get a detailed list of all improvements here.

Make sure to read the Visual Studio Team System Web Access FAQ.