Martin Woodward

To MSBuild or not to MSBuild

2009-11-15T12:30:05Z

That is the question that I am frequently asked by folks looking at the impact of Team Foundation Build moving to Windows Workflow 4.0 from MSBuild as the master build orchestration language in the TFS 2010 release.

In general I would always think carefully about re-writing everything in WF 4.0 if you have a perfectly functional MSBuild based build process. Just because things have moved towards workflow based builds in 2010, there is still plenty of logic (such as the actual compile) that is conducted in MSBuild.

Fellow former MVP turned Microsoft employee, William Bartholomew has done an excellent job of writing up the pro's and con's of the available approaches when upgrading build logic to TFS 2010.

I'm regularly asked what's the best way to upgrade an MSBuild-based build process to a Workflow Foundation-based build process and one of the most important parts of this is how to leverage the investment and dependence you have on any custom MBBuild tasks you've written. This post outlines four different ways you can make your custom MSBuild tasks callable from a Workflow Foundation workflow.

Use MSBuild Activity to call MSBuild wrapper around MSBuild task

Wrap MSBuild task in a custom Workflow Activity

Rewrite MSBuild task as a Workflow Activity

Extract custom task logic into a POCO class and provide an MSBuild Task and Workflow Activity adapters

William Bartholomew - Upgrade Paths for Custom MSBuild Tasks

William's post is worth reading in full if you are interested in this topic. Also, if you are not subscribed to his new MSDN hosted blog then I highly recommend that you do.

New Team Foundation Sidekicks for Free

2009-11-13T09:26:50Z

In my inbox this morning I got news of another new version of the Team Foundation Sidekicks from Attrice. I recommended these tools to several people during the recent TechEd EMEA event in Berlin and so it is great to new tools being added all the time.

With this release we conclude support for Visual Studio/TFS 2005 & 2008; from now on any future releases will target VS/TFS 2010. Sidekicks version for 2010 (based on Beta 2 bits) may be expected by the end of 2009.

The release 2.4 includes a relatively large number of bug fixes as well as couple of new features.

Features

Labels Sidekick: Support filtering by file extension in Labels Comparison window

Code Review Sidekick: Check-in policy violation indication shown next to changesets in a list

Workspace Sidekick: Support ability to save list of found workspaces

New Users View Sidekick: Show searchable list of user names and user display names in TFS Valid Users group

Team Foundation Sidekicks 2.4 release – Attrice

As a reminder, the sidekicks are an excellent and free add-on to Team Foundation Server. They make up an essential part of my toolkit. I’m also pleased to see that they are going to be looking into tools for the TFS2010 stack later in the year, bodes well for TF Sidekick support of TFS 2010 soon after release.

TechEd EMEA 2009 in Berlin

2009-11-10T22:46:19Z

I’m at TechEd EMEA again this year after missing last year’s EMEA event due to illness. I’m busy working the Visual Studio area in the Technical Learning Centre as usual, but for the first time as Microsoft staff rather than an MVP. The show so far has been great. We’ve been getting a lot of traffic by the TLC and lots of very challenging questions.

Having done a few of these events over the years I find it interesting how the questions change from year to year as the product and the market matures. Things have come on a long way from the days when people just wanted high level summaries of the product. Now getting a huge spread of questions, from the highly specialised point to broad architectural discussions. The conversations around the Visual Studio 2010 ALM area have been simply superb – and time has flown by.

I had a fantastic conversation today that I haven’t had for a while with a customer who had a small development team in house and was just wanting to learn more about version control in general. They were very smart and we quickly went from the fundamentals all the way up to branching and merging techniques in under 20 minutes – but it was probably the most rewarding conversation I’ve had so far this week. As the product matures we need to do more to make sure we reach people like this, rather than the temptation to always focus on the new and shiny features.

Also it has been great to see the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the Teamprise news from both inside and outside the conference. Thanks to everyone for your kind words and encouragement.

Tomorrow I’ll be joining the panel for the following session in Interactive Theatre 2 – be great to see you there especially if you have any questions about the cross-platform story.

DEV06-IS Microsoft Visual Studio Team System "Unplugged"

Wed 11/11 | 13:30-14:45 | Interactive Theatre 2 - Orange

One of the top 10 sessions from Tech·Ed last year is back even better. Join the VSTS Leadership team for Question and Answer discussion of the Team System past, present, and future. No topics are off the table and no question is too rude. Come loaded with your list of questions about what our Team System strategy is, why we've done what we've done and what's coming in 2010 and beyond. Also, please bring your favorite tales of customer challenges you face and be prepared to share them to make sure we understand what makes your job harder.

If you are at TechEd Berlin, please do drop by the Visual Studio 2010 ALM area at TLC 22 to say “Hi” or just listen in to some of the excellent conversations going on.

A New Chapter for Cross Platform TFS

2009-11-09T13:16:49Z

Four years ago this month, I joined a small start-up being created called Teamprise after reading about it on Eric Sink's blog. Our mission was to bring the benefits of application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Team Foundation Server to everyone. After all, your customers and requirements do not care about the artificial technological borders inside your organisation - so why should your ALM tools?

Today we start a new chapter in the story of accessing Team Foundation Server from Eclipse and non-Windows platforms with the announcement that Microsoft has acquired the Teamprise technology and will be releasing a new TFS 2010 targeted version next year.

As part of the deal, I was lucky enough to get offered a position as the Program Manager for this product in Microsoft - a role that I start properly today. As a (now former) Visual Studio MVP I've had a great relationship with the team behind Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, and I am incredibly excited to move into that very same group. I'm joining a team of people that I consider my friends - a team that consists of some of the smartest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Microsoft has always been committed to creating an ALM solution that was ready to support the entire enterprise and I think this commitment is demonstrated in their decision to support cross-platform and Eclipse clients under their own name. It is also a sign of how clearly the Visual Studio team listens to their customers.

There are obviously going to be some changes along the way, however we're trying to do the best we can to minimise negative impacts. The same core team of developers behind Teamprise is moving to Microsoft to carry on what was going to be Teamprise 4.0. Until Microsoft ships its version, Teamprise 3.3 will continue to be sold and supported by the Teamprise division of SourceGear. If you are an existing Teamprise customer, you will be contacted shortly to help understand what the deal means for you – but the short version is that people with a valid Teamprise 3.3 license and a TFS CAL should be eligible for an upgrade to the new version that will come from Microsoft. That said, feel free to take a look at the FAQ to see if this helps, head over to the Teamprise Support forums, or drop me a line at martinwo@microsoft.com if you have any questions or concerns that are not being answered and I'll do my best to help.

From a personal point of view, I'll continue to live in rural Northern Ireland as a remote member of the team. I also intend to continue to blog and tweet. I'll try to minimize the number of the "wow what a crazy awesome place Microsoft is to work" type posts that you see from new hires - but I probably won't be able to resist the odd one or two.

I'm very excited about all that we will be able to do with the resources of Microsoft behind us. While I officially have the job title of Program Manager, I’ll be heads-down coding for the next few weeks and months and looking forward to seeing what my new team and company come up with next year.

I'll be posting more here as this particular chapter continues, stay tuned – I’m pretty sure the next 12 months are going to be an exciting time! For more information don’t forget to take a look at Brian Harry’s blog post on the topic.

Grant Holliday on Public Workspaces in TFS 2010

2009-11-09T06:49:14Z

Grant Holliday has an excellent post up on the new public workspaces feature in TFS 2010, why it was created and how to use it. I’ve spoken with a number of Teamprise customers who will benefit from this feature when we add workspace permissions to the cross-platform client as it seems fairly common to share access to a unix based build server.

The Public Workspaces feature removes this limitation of one user per workspace and allows multiple users to use the same workspace mappings on a single machine. Unlocked workspaces are sometimes also referred to as "Shared workspaces", as they can be shared among multiple people.

Grant Holliday – TFS2010 Public Workspaces

It is going to be interesting to me to see how people use this functionality in the real world. There is certainly a potential for some anti-patterns when (mis) using the feature – however the fact that you have to explicitly make a workspace a public workspace should help a lot.

Connecting to TFS 2010 Beta 2 with Teamprise

2009-11-08T17:37:47Z

One of the features in Teamprise 3.3 is the ability to connect to a Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 project collection. The support for TFS 2010 Beta 2 in Teamprise is very similar to the support you will find in a patched Visual Studio 2008 instance – you can connect and work correctly, however some of the new TFS 2010 features will not be available.

The URL syntax in TFS has changed slightly with the 2010 release. Previously, all URL’s were relative to the root of a server, but with the introduction of project collections you have a longer URL in the form of

http://servername:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection

Where “servername” is the name of your TFS instance, “8080” is the port, “/tfs” is the virtual directory that TFS is installed in and “DefaultCollection” is the name of the project collection you want to connect to. Like Visual Studio 2008, Teamprise 3.3 cannot connect to the application instance to determine which project collections are available – you have to be provided the name or URL from your TFS administrator.

However you can connect now using one of the new URL formats, and if you have a Sharepoint site or a reports site configured their correct locations will be used in Team Explorer. If you have performed a basic installation of TFS (i.e. with no Sharepoint or Reports services configured) then the Documents and Reports nodes in Team Explorer will just not display.

Virtualized Aero Goodness

2009-10-29T13:59:59Z

On Tuesday, VMware announced the latest in their product lines, VMware Fusion 3 and Workstation 7. While I have been a fan of VMware Fusion on the Mac for a while – this latest version is fantastic. As well as Snow Leopard fixes, there are lots of improvements in how “Mac-ish” the product feels. Best of all Aero is now fully supported inside a virtual machine.

I’m currently writing this post from my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard running Windows 7 as a VM. I have to say that running Windows 7 inside the virtual machine is actually a much better experience than I’ve been having running Windows 7 as the BootCamp partition lately. This is largely due to driver issues, but also the muscle memory for my fingers when typing on my MacBook is to use Cmd+C and Cmd+V all the time when copy/pasting – and I forget to press Ctrl instead. Luckily VMware keesp an eye out for this and just do the right thing.

All in all, it is a very good experience that I’d recommend to anyone that has to run multiple operating systems. Windows 7 works well in a VM where Vista used to struggle a little. It also allows for my favorite Teamprise demo. I set up the session so that I’m driving it from my MacBook Pro with VMware running full screen using Spaces to have it set to the right hand of the two spaces that I run. I start the demo in Windows and then half way through use Ctrl+Left to instantly move to Mac OS and carry on the Teamprise demo from the completely different OS. Really wakes people up after I’ve done my best to put them to sleep for 15 minutes.

Windows Live Writer and Movable Type

2009-10-22T19:57:16Z

I've been an avid Windows Live Writer user since the early days, and for many years I've used Moveable Type for my personal blog. The reason I went with Moveable Type was initially because that was what some of the other blogs that I read where using. The other thing I liked about it is that files are published as HTML onto the server making the serving of blog pages a very easy task for the web server to do - meaning that my site typically copes well when a post get's a lot of traffic (talk about tempting fate...). While it doesn't have the wide community support that Wordpress has - it works well for me and I'm still very happy with it despite trying lots of others (Wordpress, DasBlog, Community Server etc)

This is, it was all working well. Last week I switched my hosting from an Ubuntu machine over to a Windows Server 2008 R2 based machine. My reason for doing this is that I'm wanting to have a play with some ASP.NET MVC 2 based sites using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - and I wanted a server that I could host all my sites on.

Moving the server over was a fairly painless process. Especially considering I was moving a backup from an Ubuntu + psql based host to a Windows + MySQL environment. The one problem I was having was that Windows Live Writer was no longer working for me. Whenever I tried to log into my blog I got the following error:

Now, I knew my password was valid because I'd been logging in to the web interface with it. After much digging it turns out that Movable Type now has a separate web service password to the web site password. This is because the web service password is stored in clear text in the database, but the normal login is stored as an MD5 hash.

I changed the web service password in my profile in the Movable Type console to a cryptographically random string and copy/pasted that into the password field in Movable Type and now I can post entries again.

Apologies is anyone has been having trouble accessing my blog during this transition or got spammed with new feed posts. Hopefully things are working for everyone.

As a side note - Windows Live Writer is by far the best blog editor I've found that handles Moveable Type. I'm surprised that nothing as easy to use exists on the Mac side (I've tried most of them). If anyone knows of a good Windows Live Writer competitor over on the Mac then I'd love to hear your recommendations.

The Ultimate Announcement Show

2009-10-19T17:32:53Z

Today, Microsoft made some important announcements regarding the future of Visual Studio 2010 along with the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2. Paul, Mickey and I were lucky enough to grab a few minutes to record a show with Doug Seven, Product Manager with Visual Studio, where he took us through the announcements and we got chance to quiz him on some of the details.

Play Now: The Ultimate Announcement Show.

As usual, for questions or feedback about the show drop an email to radiotf@gmail.com or call +1 425 233 8379. Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks of the new functionality in Beta 2.

Changeset comments are editable in TFS

2009-10-13T11:13:56Z

A feature of changeset metadata in Team Foundation Server 2008 is that it is actually editable. If you look at the changeset details for a historical check-in in Visual Studio you will notice that the comment and check-in notes fields are enabled and there is a “Save” button. This is by design, but I have known customers that find this fact very surprising.

In fact people are so surprised that this is even possible that in Teamprise we currently do not provide a way to edit the comment or check-in notes and guess how many customer requests we have had so far to add it? I’ll give you a clue – it’s less than 1.

Anyway – apart from removing the odd bit of unsavoury language from a frustrated late night check-in, today I found a handy use for updating the comments after the fact.

In TFS 2008 SP1, Microsoft introduced a new feature in the server – to allow branches to be created and committed in a single operation. This is exposed in the command line using the tf branch /checkin option or through the API using the undocumented VersionControlServer.CreateBranch method. Creating a branch in this way is very fast because it bypasses the whole requirement to have a workspace created, working folders mapped, a branch to be pended and then the branch finally checked in. It also uses significantly less server resources to perform which is why the feature got added in the first place. Microsoft have some very large branches that they manage in TFS :-)

The problem with the current version of the CreateBranch method is that it doesn’t add a comment to the changeset during the branch operation. But you can, as we now know, add a comment after the fact. Below is a code snippet to demonstrate this:

public void CreateBranchWithComment(

    string serverUrl,

    string sourcePath,

    string targetPath,

    string comment)

{

    TeamFoundationServer tfs = new TeamFoundationServer(serverUrl);

    VersionControlServer vcServer =

        (VersionControlServer)tfs.GetService(typeof(VersionControlServer));

    int changesetId = vcServer.CreateBranch(

        sourcePath,

        targetPath,

        VersionSpec.Latest);

    Changeset changeset = vcServer.GetChangeset(changesetId);

    changeset.Comment = comment;

    changeset.Update();

}

Hope that helps somebody. In TFS 2010 there is an additional overload of the CreateBranch method that allows you to optionally specify many things about the changeset created including a command and check-in notes so this workaround isn’t necessary there.

Remember, use your new found changeset comment altering powers for good rather than for pranking your colleagues.

TFS on the Mainframe

2009-09-23T20:07:26Z

I’m playing with a lot of cool stuff at the moment as we get ready for Team Foundation Server 2010, but accessing TFS from the Mac or inside Eclipse doesn’t give me as many of those “it shouldn’t work that well” moments any more. But today I had big one of those moments while I was helping test an application we are playing with internally.

Yup, that’s Teamprise running on a mainframe. A z/OS R08 based system to be precise. We’ve had prototypes of our command line client running on z/OS Unix for a while now, however it was using too many system resources to be suitable to run in a real shared mainframe environment. As part of our development for Teamprise 4.0 we’ve been putting a lot of the code on a diet to improve memory usage and performance and now running the command line on z/OS UNIX is looking more and more of a possibility.

But of course, z/OS Unix is pretty new in the world of mainframes and there are still lots of people using 3270 emulators and running TSO. I developed in TSO when doing my first professional programming job as a PL/1 developer back in the days of MVS on OS/390. When the opportunity came around to help test our mainframe efforts I jumped at the chance.

It’s early days for the mainframe client. While the z/OS UNIX side is working very well, the TSO stuff is still just beginning. We have both a command based interface in TSO and a menu driven one in ISPF. Both are wrappers around the Teamprise z/OS Command Line Client that allow users to enter tf commands without starting the USS. The applications start an instance of the command line client and then keep it running while the user is in the interactive session to avoid having to restart the Java virtual machine running the command line client repeatedly. The result is that the application is pretty snappy even though it is talking to a TFS server hosted in the cloud.

Anyway, it is early days – but just wanted to share. Some days I love my job – and today really put a smile on my face. Kudos to the team internally working on this, I’ll be sure to post more information when we are getting closer to making this more widely available.

Speaking at the Virtual Team System Users Group

2009-09-17T11:47:38Z

Tonight I have the pleasure of speaking with the Team System Users Group Virtual Edition. We are going to be talking about Team Build 2010 based on the Beta 1 bits.

TSUG-VE September Meeting (EMEA)

Meeting Date: Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Time: 10:00AM PDT (1800 BST)
[Add to calendar]

Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=TGNB8S&role=attend&pw=g(%>c~7xQ

Build Automation in TFS 2010
In this session, Team System MVP Martin Woodward takes us through the radically improved team build features in TFS 2010 Beta 1. You will learn all about the new private builds, gated check-ins and most importantly take a look at the new Windows Workflow based build system. Finally we will talk about protecting your investment in TFS2008 build automation and discuss what the TFS2010 build automation experience will be like for Visual Studio 2008 developers.

Update: As promised, please find the slide decks from this presentation below :-

Radio TFS on Team System 2010 First Impressions

2009-09-15T15:36:04Z

Just released the latest Radio TFS episode. We got the whole gang together so decided to have a catch up and a chat about our first impression from using Beta 1 of Team System for a few weeks.

Play Now: Random Beta 1 Stuff

Links from the show:

Team System Beta 1
Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Tool List
- SourceGear DiffMerge
- Input Director (free for personal use)
Matt Mitrick on Changing to Slot Mode in TFS

It was nice to all be back together again. Don’t forget to visit the Radio TFS site and subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or Zune for early access to all the latest shows.

Hosted TFS for BizSpark Companies

2009-09-03T19:30:52Z

Fellow MVP Paul Hacker just dropped me a line to share a great offer his company is making available for BizSpark companies. For companies that are in the BizSpark program you can get a hassle free, hosted Team Foundation Server service as a substantial discount (currently $10 per month, per user).

Microsoft BizSpark is a global program designed to help accelerate the success of entrepreneurs and early stage startups. In addition to a fabulous software offer, BizSpark also provides professional support from Microsoft technical experts and other resources. BizSpark is open to privately held businesses in operation for less than 3 years with less than 1 million USD annual revenue.

The SaaS Made Easy offer makes it very simple and cost effective to have your team working in TFS from day one. Another advantage of it being a hosted service is that it makes it well suited to a geographically dispersed virtual team.

For more information on the offer, and links to the BizSpark program head over to the SaaS Made Easy web site.

TFS 2010 API By Example: Introduction

2009-08-26T14:21:52Z

As I am exploring programming against TFS 2010, I usually build myself up a collection of code snippets that show me how to do various discrete operations. I thought it would be useful for me to post some of these to my blog so that others might benefit later. Note that this code was written against TFS 2010 Beta 1 so may well change by the time you read this – but hopefully it will give you some idea where to get started.

I’ve got a few that I wanted to post, but before I do I thought I’d better take some time to explain a fundamental new level TFS Object Model – the TeamFoundationApplicationInstance.

Team Foundation Server Application Instance.

In TFS 2010 a new level has been introduced. Previously in TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 all you needed to connect to was a TeamFoundationServer. The TFS server object was equal to the Team Foundation Server instance that you had deployed. On that TFS server were a number of Team Projects. Each Team Project had it’s own notion of work item tracking process, builds, project portal, reports and a node in version control for the server. However work items and version control changesets were all numbered server wide. If you created work item 1 in Team Project 1 then the next work item you created, in any project on that server, would be work item 2. There were a number of other things that were tracked at the server level.

Now in 2010 we have a new higher level of abstraction called the Team Project Collection. In many ways, a project collection is what we used to think of as the Team Foundation Server – it contains Team Projects - and each project collection is isolated from the others meaning that work item 1 in DefaultCollection is different from work item 1 in Collection B. However you still need to connect to something that next level up to find your project collections and that thing is the TFS Application Instance.

To maintain compatibility the TFS Object Model keeps the name TeamFoundationServer for the thing that we now know to be the Team Project Collection. A new class is introduced called a TeamFoundationApplicationInstance. As the application instance shares many things in common with the TeamFoundationServer a new base class has also been introduced called TeamFoundationServerBase. The class diagram for these is shown below, if you click on the image it should open a full size version in a new window.

You can construct a new TeamFoundationAppicationInstance much in the same way that you would have created a TeamFoundationServer object previously.

TeamFoundationApplicationInstance tfs = new TeamFoundationApplicationInstance(

new Uri("http://tfs2010:8080/tfs"));

Note that in 2010, the TFS Application Instance URL is typically in the form http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/ where “tfs” is the virtual path to the tfs application instance as defined when you installed TFS. Project collection URLs are now in the form “http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/ProjectCollectionName”. When connecting to a TFS 2008 or TFS 2005 server you still use a TeamFoundationServer object like you did before and by the old URL style i.e. something like “http://tfsserver:8080”.

Anyway, that’s probably enough introduction. Next up we’ll look at how to tell if a server you want to talk to is in the new TFS2010 style or if it is a “legacy” TFS server (i.e. TFS 2008 or TFS 2005).