Martin Woodward

Ed Blankenship on Using TFS

2009-07-01T12:53:06Z

Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with my good friend and fellow MVP Ed Blankenship to learn about the Team Foundation Server deployment in Infragistics. They have a global development team working 24x7 and their Team Foundation Server is now critical to the daily operation of the business. Ed has plenty of tips and tricks in keeping TFS running with high availability but also in the organizational challenges when deploying the tools across a diverse, global software development organization.

We recorded our chat and I’ve just made it available as Radio TFS episode 23.

Play Now: Radio TFS - Using TFS with Ed Blankenship

As well as talking about the challenges of rolling out TFS to a large, global organization, we also discussed some of the innovative integration work Ed’s team has carried out to integrate TFS with Microsoft CRM.

It turned out to be a longer show than usual, almost a double length episode. Hopefully people will find time over the holiday weekend to listen to it. I’m keen to hear your feedback. We are trying to step up the number of Radio TFS episodes that we put out to two a month. If you haven’t subscribed to Radio TFS then now is the time.

Photo courtesy of Barry Gervin.

Case Study: iGate standardizing on TFS

2009-06-29T15:10:58Z

TFS has a many strengths. Two of them that I particularly like talking about are it’s performance over a wide area network and the strong IDE integration available for both .NET and Java developers (the latter via Teamprise of course). Microsoft have just posted a new case study with iGate, one of the top 20 global outsourcing companies which talks about this in depth.

iGate has been assesed at CMMI Level 5, Six Sigma methodologies and is COBIT, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified. They have 8 offices in 12 countries and manage global delivery centers in Mexico, Australia, and India. Like most software development organizations, version control is critical infrastructure and they chose TFS to manage software development projects across all platforms.

“When we implemented Visual Studio Team System, we noticed immediate process improvement through automation. It reduces the administrative burden and reduction in administration efforts leads to significant cost savings of 55 percent.”

Chella Namasivayam M
Vice President IT & IS, iGATE.

iGate chose TFS ahead of tools such as IBM Rational ClearCase, MKS Implementer and CVS. For more information on why and what benefits they have got from standardizing on a single platform take a look at the case study.

Slotting into TFS 2010

2009-06-15T13:50:04Z

In TFS 2010 quite a few things have been fundamentally changed for the better, but from an end user point of view people hopefully won’t notice. Things like hierarchical work items will very quickly because just how work items should work and people will scratch their heads when they go look at a TFS 2008 or TFS 2005 server and wondered how we ever got by.

However in version control, the changes have been even more subtle from the end user point of view but are actually huge under the covers. The biggest change by far in TFS 2010 is the move to Slot Mode version control from the current Item Mode. Version Control PM Matt Mitrik has a excellent post entitled “Changing to Slot Mode in TFS 2010 Version Control” which I encourage you to take a look at.

“In TFS 2010, one of the more significant changes that we made to our version control platform was how we identify items. Previously, version control operated in what we called “item mode” and in TFS 2010 it operates in “slot mode”. To better understand the motivation and impact of these changes, and what “item mode” and “slot mode” actually mean, I’ve decided to provide some background and detail into the changes we’ve made.”

Matt Mitrick – Changing to Slot Mode in TFS 2010 Version Control

Basically a really fundamental concept at the heart of TFS has been completely changed – but like hierarchical work items I anticipate most people will just look at it in the future and think that’s how it should always have been. Hopefully merges will be a lot less complex but the simple things are preserved like the fact that TFS shows the history of a file from before a rename. Note that some of these changes have not arrived yet in the Beta 1 build that is currently publicly available so we’ll have to wait until Beta 2 to see exactly how the end user experience pans out.

As well as simplifying the merge process the changes have also allowed for a big performance and scalability improvement on the server side. Grant Holliday talks about some of the benefits that Microsoft saw internally when he discusses the “Schema Change” in the current episode of Radio TFS.

Team Build Screensaver in WPF

2009-06-11T12:43:28Z

I recently stumbled across a handy Team Foundation Build screensaver created by Jim Liddell and wanted to share it as it seems very good. For my team build talks I created a Team Build Wallboard as a code sample, however Jim has created his own as a WPF based screensaver and it looks very nice.

A few features that I particularly liked:

Deployed as a screen saver (.scr) with full configuration options via the screen saver properties
Ability to display multiple builds from multiple team projects
Nice, clean WPF based vector graphics
Multi-monitor support

The code is also pretty clean, and reminds a WPF novice like me how different a true WPF based programming model can be from WinForms. The only issue I had with it is that I had to download the source code and recompile as x86 only against the TFS2008 API’s to get it to run on my main dev machine which is a Vista x64 machine with VSTS2010 Beta 1 installed.

Anyway, the code is up on CodePlex under the permissive MS-PL license, so I would encourage you to give it a look and give Jim your feedback or even contribute back features that you would like to add.

Notice in the picture above that Jim has a Build Bunny sat next to his Build Monitor as well - great to see them breeding like, well – you know…

Policy Override Email Alerts

2009-06-10T11:42:45Z

A guiding principle with Team Foundation Server is that all the flexibility of configuration and all the control should not get in the way of getting work done. For example, if you try to do a check-in that fails a defined check-in policy, you get the following warning.

The key thing about check-in policies is that you can always override them. Some check-in policies (such as the Build policy) actually rely on this behaviour. However, this fact can irk some software configuration managers when they first figure this out. They’ve defined a check-in policy for a good reason, and gosh darned it they do not want their developers to be able to check-in unless they meet the check-in policy or they better have a really good reason.

Now, don’t get me started on how check-in policies can be abused in TFS. Like all shiny new toys, sometimes people can go crazy with them and have check-in policies to enforce things (such as code coverage) that in my opinion would be best covered by an automated build system. But that rant is off limits for today. Let’s take a check-in policy that I wouldn’t have a problem with, the check for work item policy. This policy ensures that you developer has captured which work item the check-in is related to. The key point about this check-in policy is that if you do not capture that information now then it is hard to remember exactly which work item that should be later on.

When introducing this new check-in policy to a team, you want to make sure that everyone understand the value in associating work item to check-ins. Being able to explain this to a large team also makes you question the value yourself which is an important self check before switching it on. Remember All check-in policies cost money. Each check-in policy you enable will slow down the check-in process just a fraction. As you want people to be checking in regularly this fraction is amplified. Taking a rough figure of each check-in policy takes 5 seconds to ensure you have correctly met, roughly translates to 5 cents per check-in for developer time in a US company, Say you have on average 6 check-ins per day (a figure that you are always trying to raise). Therefore, this quick back of an envelop calculation puts the annual cost of a check-in policy to be around $70 per developer per year.

Not a huge amount, considering how much free soda a developer can drink in a year – but still not beer change either. The key point is not so much cost, but that the cost is per check-in. People always try to take the path of least resistance, therefore the more you penalise the check-in process by slowing it down the less often people will check-in – which is exactly the opposite behaviour that you want to encourage.

Anyway, once you have convinced everyone including yourself of the value of a check-in policy, you now want to encourage people adhere to it. The problem of course is that check-in policies can be overriden by checking a box and typing in a single letter as the comment. Overriding check-in policies is something that you want people to think carefully about, and in my experience the best way of making people think about something in the development process is peer pressure.

Configuring Email Alerts for Check-in Policy Overrides

For people to not override a check-in policy without thinking about it, there has to be some penalty involved in overriding the policy. Often this is simply the fact that the policy warning box will pop up. It is usually easier to find the valid work item than it is to go through the check-in policy override dialog. That said, you can easily configure TFS to send an email to an individual – or more usefully in this scenario – a distribution list every time someone overrides a check-in policy. This has two effects. First, it makes them think if they have a good reason for overriding the policy – their managers and peers will get an email if they override, so this makes you pause for thought straight away. Secondly, because the comment provided in the check-in policy override is in the email sent by TFS it encourages people to properly document the reason for the policy override in the comment box rather than just typing some random characters.

The easiest way to create a check-in policy override email is to install the Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools. This includes the very useful alerts editor into your Team Explorer. Double clicking the Alerts node in Team Explorer will bring up the alerts editor, where you can press “New” to create a new alert.

There are a number of default alerts provided with the tool, and the one that we want is under the Check-in Alerts section, “Check-In to a specific folder with a policy overridden”.

In the alert, you then provide the email address that you want it sent to.

If anyone now overrides the check-in policy, and email will be sent to the address provided in your alert along with the reason they provided for overriding the policy. It’s then up to the organization to ensure that these stay rare events, that people not providing a good reason are suitably ashamed and that everyone just doesn’t set up an email filter to send those messages to the trash.

As with all actions, there are consequences which you have to think through. For example, by switching on the work item association policy and enabling policy override emails are you now making it so that people will randomly associate a check-in with any work item? It’s because of constant issues like this that you have to make sure everyone understands why the check-in policies are in place in the first place and buys into the procedure that you would want them to follow.

My Current Podcasts

2009-05-28T11:19:42Z

In the days before I worked for Teamprise, I had a 3 hour, 120 mile commute. Luckily, at that time a new thing called “podcasting” was starting to take off and so my travels were filled listening to the few podcasts that were available back then. We are talking pretty early in the history of podcasting. Back then Dave Winer and Adam Curry were still on talking terms. Rory Blyth was taking over from Mark Dunn as co-host of DotNetRocks with Carl Franklin and shows would be multiple hour epics, occasionally spilling over into .NET technology but with plenty of tangential discussions. Interestingly, I’ve actually been a DotNetRocks listener longer than I have been into podcasts. Back when I strarted listening to the show I had to burn episodes onto a CD-R (sometimes 2) and it was listening to one of these shows that I heard Carl talking about putting the shows into an RSS feed for automatic delivery to an MP3 player. It was then I got my first iPod and my commute was much more enjoyable.

Times have changed. My commute has gone from 3 hours to 3 seconds, however I find I still have plenty of time in the day (when doing chores around the house, or when exercising etc) to listen to an increasing number of podcasts. Recently, Grant Holiday tweeted to ask what podcasts people would recommend and as I couldn’t reply with them all in 140 characters I thoughts I would write this post. Below is my list of podcasts that I am currently subscribed to.

Apple Keynotes – All the Apple announcements the day after the event
Stack Overflow – Jeff and Joel talking about software development and the StackOverflow website with the occasional interesting guest.
Creative Screenwriters Magazine – Interviews with the Screenwriters behind many of the big Holywood films
David Mitchell’s Soapbox – Video monologues from British Comedian David Mitchell
Diggnation – Two men, two laptops and several beers
Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 – Topical satire comedy from Radio 4
gdgt Weekly – Peter and Ryan talk about gadgets even though they have both left Engadget and are busy not releasing their next site gdgt
Hanselminutes – Scott Hanselman’s podcast
The History of Microsoft – Channel 9 show going through the Microsoft archives
iPhone Application Programming – Standford University course on iPhone Application Development with Apple engineers taking the kids through the course.
MacBreak Weekly – Leo Laporte and the gang talking about Mac News if there is any, or speculating about stuff if there isn’t. This is actually my favourite of the TWiT shows.
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo Film Reviews – Wittertainment at it’s best
.NET Rocks – The original .NET podcast. Richard and Carl talking about .NET technologies
Peter Day’s World of Business – Peter Day’s insights into the business world
Podcasts for Running – Couch to 5k training program
Radio TFS – Mickey, Paul and I talking about Team System occasionally with various special guests
Robert Llewellyn’s Car Pool – Bobby Llew giving his famous mates an entertaining drive in his Prius
RunAs Radio – The IT Pro angle from the PWOP gang, with good guests
Security Now – Leo Laporte talks to Steve Gibson about security news. Sometime’s Steve’s attitudes to development and computers drives me to shout back at my iPod in frustration, but it still is a great way of keeping on top of what’s happening in the security area.
TED Talks – Talks from people cleverer than me about interesting things. Not only that, they are all much better at presenting than I am
The Thirsty Developer – Microsoft evalgelists Dave Bost and Larry Clarkin talking about technologies interesting in the Microsoft space but mostly from an Architecture angle.
This Week in Tech – Unedited ramblings of various technology commentators, mostly interesting
This Week On Channel 9 – Dan and Brian’s round up of interesting goings on in the Microsoft technology space
Google TechTalks – Google gets interesting people in to talk and makes many of them available to the public
Windows Weekly – Paul Thurrott commentating on developments in the Microsoft space, focussing on the consumer side
10-4 – Nice short screencasts highlighting areas in Visual Studio 2010 or .NET 4.0

OK, I admit that I have a problem, but still I find that listening to these podcasts helps me keep an idea of what is going on in the technology world in my spare time, but I also find them all genuinely entertaining as well as educational. If you have any that you think I should be listening to then let me know.

TFS 2010 Beta 1 with Teamprise

2009-05-21T15:09:27Z

Now that TFS 2010 Beta 1 is publically available, I thought it would make sense to share our plans with everyone. Teamprise has been working closely with Microsoft on the TFS 2010 release. First of all, can I quickly thank all the people at Microsoft who have been helping us so far. All the way from the individual developers working on features all the way up to the very highest leadership, we have had nothing put fantastic support and rapid responses to our questions.

I remember attending meetings almost two years ago now with many of the Teamprise developers at the Microsoft offices to talk about this version back when it was known only with the codename Rosario. We’ve been actively working on builds since last year and in fact Brian Harry demonstrated Teamprise talking to TFS2010 at PDC in October 2008.

But we have a long way to go. The current plan is that Teamprise 4.0 will be our “TFS 2010 compatible release”, including many of the new TFS 2010 features. We aim to ship Teamprise 4.0 with-in a couple of weeks of when Microsoft launches TFS 2010. Before that date we will have previews of Teamprise 4.0 for people wanting to test our clients against their TFS 2010 beta environments. The current plan is to ramp up our preview program around the Beta 2 timeframe of TFS 2010. We will also have TFS2010 Beta 2 compatible versions of our Teamprise Build Extensions. If anyone is on Microsoft’s early adopter programs and is blocked from being able to provide Microsoft with TFS feedback until they also have Teamprise clients to test with, then please drop a line to support@teamprise.com so we know about you as soon as possible. We plan to be dogfooding against TFS2010 beta’s here at Teamprise very early.

If you want to use current versions of Teamprise today with TFS 2010 Beta 1, then there are several known issues. However the basics of version control and work item tracking are both operational. That said, using TFS 2010 Beta 1 with Teamprise is not supported so use it at your own risk.

First of all, you must be running the latest version of Teamprise (3.2.2) for anything to work. We had to make some changes to the 3.2 release to allow check-ins to work against a TFS2010 server and we included those in the 3.2.1 public release.

Next, Team Foundation Server must be configured to not be in a virtual directory. By default, a fresh install of TFS 2010 Beta 1 will exist at http://server:8080/tfs where “tfs” is the virtual directory for the TFS application. This makes TFS much easier to host inside an existing web site (i.e. on a single port shared with Sharepoint etc) – however Teamprise 3.X doesn’t know about virtual directories. Therefore when you install TFS 2010 Beta 1 you will have to do a customised installation and blank out the Virtual Directory text box in the Application Tier settings.

Teamprise 3.X (like Visual Studio 2008) also doesn’t know about Project Collections. Therefore you will only be able to access the default project collection on each TFS instance using Teamprise 3.X. Once you have this configured – the TFS 2010 beta 1 server will look much the same as accessing a TFS 2010 server does from Visual Studio 2008.

And there you have it. The next few weeks and months are shaping up to be great fun as we all get to test out this massive new version of the Team System products. Visual Studio Team System 2010 is a huge release, but one that addresses many adoption issues that people have today with the product. I’m incredibly excited now that the Beta of VSTS is publically available so we can all start talking about it and figuring out new best practises etc. If you thought adoption of Team System was going well up until now, the adoption of this 2010 release is going to be huge. With all the new stuff to learn, and the potential even this early beta of the product is showing – now is a very exciting time to be in the Team System space :-)

If you have any questions or comments about Teamprise and TFS 2010 then please drop the support team a line, or contact me.

TechEd Online 2009: Cross Platform Development with Team Foundation Server and Teamprise

2009-05-19T10:32:40Z

Last week at TechEd 2009 North America, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Keller to discuss Teamprise past, present and future. If you have Silverlight installed you can watch the interview or you can download the video from the TechEd site.

Rock The Build with TFS

2009-05-05T10:47:04Z

If bunnies are just a little bit too cute and fluffy for you, then you might be interested in a little side project that reader Terry Humphries just got in touch with me about. You see Terry had no love for robotic rabbits in the build process – but an electric guitar was something that he and the other developers in his team would pay attention to. So he hooked up a vintage 1990’s Warlock Electric guitar made by B.C.Rich to TFS and let that rock their world. I thought this was a cool project so asked permission to share his email with you all. If you want to get in touch with Terry, drop me a line and I’ll send your details on to him.

From: Terry Humphries

My name is Terry Humphries and I work for EnGraph Software. I’ve been a developer for over 25 years the last three months at EnGraph. I came here to join a development team that was scaling up from a couple of developers to over 14 folks. Part of my job has been and continues to be leading EnGraph’s push into using Team System. I spend part of my time wearing a developer hat and part wearing the TFS admin, Build Sensei hat.

Having always been a strong believer in nightly builds and making sure everyone is aware of the status of the build, I’m always looking for ways to get the other developers invested in the status of the build.

Having seen Brain aka the Build Bunny and the Lava Lamp build indicator I decided it was time to create something unique for EnGraph to use.

I almost used a full size traffic light, but since all of the pcs here are named after guitar manufacturers, a Build Guitar seemed the way to go, and the search was on. It took me about three week to locate the used Warlock I used as the basis of the project. I didn’t want a run of the mill guitar, it need to be electric and it needed to have a unique look. When I got the Warlock it’s better years were behind it, the body was in bad shape. I had to end up stripping it, filling in a few dings and refinishing it with a purple undercoat and a bronze metallic pearlized overcoat.

I looked at several options for the switching mechanism for the LEDS. Basically, I wanted something that would provide the low dc power needed to drive the LEDS and a programmable interface for switching them on/off. I considered Ethernet based relays, Bluetooth based relays, Ethernet to parallel port converters, and USB controlled relays. Mostly because the other options were much more costly I settled on the USB controlled relay. I decided to mount this control circuit in its own box and use standard Ethernet cabling to get the power to the guitar from the relay. With this option the only things I had to mount in the guitar were the LEDs, the Ethernet jack, and wire connecting them.

Once I obtained everything I need I started build the controller. Wanting it to also be somewhat different I decided to mount the relay circuit old 3.5 diskette plastic case that was designed to hold 10 diskettes. After mounting the circuit board I added the ethernet jack and connected the power supply. Cut a few hole for the cables and bam the Build Guitar Controller was born.

Next, guitar time. I decided the best place to mount the LEDs was in one of the pickup coil frames, you see a Warlock comes with 2 Humbucker pickup coils each mounted in its own frame. I fashioned a piece of black plastic to fit the frame and drilled three holes for the LEDS. Then I wired the LEDS to the Ethernet jack I had placed in the jackplate.

Then I hooked everything up loaded the Phidgets drivers and using they’re control panel applet tested the wiring and after a few minutes I had everything working as planned.

The folks at Phidgets provide 2 way to interface with their devices, either directly or via a webservice, I used both. I couldn’t find a TFS event that fires when a build starts so I created a custom task that turned on the correct relay and hooked it into our build scripts via the BeforeEndToEndIteration target and then used Howard van Rooijen TFS Event Framework to react to the BuildCompletionEndpoint to set the red and green leds.

The basic code for manipulating the relays is only 9 lines:

InterfaceKit RelayPhidget = new InterfaceKit();

RelayPhidget.open("gibson", 5001);

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000); //wait for the server to connect

RelayPhidget.outputs[0] = false;     //Set build start off

RelayPhidget.outputs[1] = true;      //Set build success on

RelayPhidget.outputs[2] = false;     //Set the other off

RelayPhidget.outputs[3] = false;

RelayPhidget.close();

RelayPhidget = null;

I’m not sure what else I can tell you about it other that it’s a big hit with the other developers. As for more about EnGraph you can visit our web site at www.engraph.com

Hardware:

Warlock Electric guitar made by B.C.Rich vintage 1990s
10MM diffused LEDS in Blue, green and red
Phidget Interface Kit 0/0/4 available here
5VDC 350milliamp wallwort power supply
Various bit of wire, tape glue paint, etc.

Software:

Team Foundation Server Notification Event project template from Howard van Rooijen
VS2008
Phidgets Driver

Thanks for sharing this with me Terry, and for allowing me to post your email. For anyone interested, I’ll be talking more about integrating with Team Foundation Build API’s during my session at Tech·Ed North America 2009 next week.

DTL307 Brian the Build Bunny: Extending Team Foundation Server Build

Fri 5/15 | 9:00 AM-10:15 AM | Room 404

This session digs deep into customization of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server Build system. Learn about the .NET API for Team Foundation Build and how to use it to create your own build status display or even have your team chastised about build failures by a robotic rabbit.

Building Maven Projects with Team Foundation Build

2009-04-23T10:26:40Z

For a while now, we’ve been helping our Java customers by providing the Teamprise Build Extensions to allow people to easily build Ant based projects using Team Foundation Build and publish JUnit test results into TFS for inclusion in the reports etc. With the release of Teamprise 3.2 we also released a new version of the Teamprise Build Extensions which enables Maven based builds to be performed under Team Foundation Build with the same ease. We’ve been using this with a few different customers this year and it has proven to be very successful so I wanted to spread the word a little.

The easiest way to build a Maven project from Team Foundation Server is to install the Teamprise Build Extensions on your build server using the MSI installer provided on the download site (http://www.teamprise.com/products/build/). You must also have a Java JDK and a copy of Maven 2 installed on the build server. See the User’s Guide for full details.

You can then use a copy of Teamprise Explorer or the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse to create the build definition.

Once you have given the build definition a name and specified what should be included in the build using the usual options, go to the Project File section.

Just as in Visual Studio you can change the folder that you want the build configuration to be stored (1) but when you press the Create button (2) things differ a bit from the Visual Studio interface.

As you can see, you are prompted as to what type of build you would like to create. When connected to a TFS 2008 server you will be offered two options, Ant and Maven. In our case we are going to select Maven and then we get to pick the master POM file for our Maven 2 build

The wizard will then create the TFSBuild.proj file necessary to run the Maven 2 project and check it into the build configuration folder specified previously. You can then define you trigger and build agent just as you would normally and you should be good to go.

As well as creating the build definition, the Teamprise client simply creates a TFSBuild.proj file in the following format which you could easily create yourself if you wanted to create the build from Visual Studio or something.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Project DefaultTargets="DesktopBuild" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="3.5">



<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" />

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Teamprise\v2\Teamprise.Build.Maven2.targets" />

<ProjectExtensions>

    <ProjectFileVersion>2</ProjectFileVersion>

    <Description></Description>

    <BuildMachine>buildserver.mycompany.com</BuildMachine>

</ProjectExtensions>

<PropertyGroup>

    <TeamProject>Billing</TeamProject>

    <BuildDirectoryPath>UNKNOWN</BuildDirectoryPath>

    <DropLocation>\\UNKNOWN\drops</DropLocation>

    <SkipWorkItemCreation>false</SkipWorkItemCreation>

    <WorkItemType>Bug</WorkItemType>

    <WorkItemFieldValues>

      System.Reason=Build Failure;System.Description=Start the build using Team Build

    </WorkItemFieldValues>

    <WorkItemTitle>Build failure in build:</WorkItemTitle>

    <DescriptionText>This work item created on a build failure.</DescriptionText>

    <BuildlogText>The build log file is at:</BuildlogText>

    <ErrorWarningLogText>The errors/warnings log file is at:</ErrorWarningLogText>

    <UpdateAssociatedWorkItems>true</UpdateAssociatedWorkItems>

</PropertyGroup>

<ItemGroup>

    

    <MavenPomFile Include="$/Billing/Main/billing-service/pom.xml">

      <Goals>install</Goals>

      <Properties>

         BinariesRoot=$(BinariesRoot);BuildDefinitionName=$(BuildDefinitionName);

         BuildDefinitionUri=$(BuildDefinitionUri);BuildDirectory=$(BuildDirectory);

         BuildNumber=$(BuildNumber);DropLocation=$(DropLocation);LogLocation=$(LogLocation);

         SourceGetVersion=$(SourceGetVersion);TestResultsRoot=$(TestResultsRoot);

         TeamProject=$(TeamProject);WorkspaceName=$(WorkspaceName);

         WorkspaceOwner=$(WorkspaceOwner)

      </Properties>

    </MavenPomFile>

</ItemGroup>

</Project>

The Import statement at the top is calling the Teamprise.Build.Maven2.targets file. This safely inserts the call to Maven 2 into the Team Foundation Build process. It uses the MavenPomFile item group to specify the server path of the POM file to build – this is converted into a local path as part of the build process.

The Maven 2 integration will listen for surefire steps as part of the build process and automatically include those files in the list of JUnit results to publish to TFS. It will also automatically copy any files in the Maven 2 targets directory over to the drop location for build archival purposes.

The Teamprise Build Extensions are provided free of charge, and the source code is available under the permissive open source MS-PL license if you want to take a look in more detail at what they do and how they do it.

Internally, we also have a Maven SCM Provider for TFS coded up and we are about to submit this to the Maven project so that people using Maven will be able to perform SCM operations easily from inside their projects (and use things like the Maven Release plug-in to perform releases). If you would like a copy of the SCM provider in the mean time then let me know and I can send you a copy.

Looking forward to hearing what people think. Now that we have both Maven 2 and Ant support for building Java projects in Team Foundation Server this really helps Java development be a first class citizen in the TFS world. I’m always keen to hear feedback how we can improve the situation further if you have any suggestions then let me know.

Radio TFS: Oracle Support for Visual Studio Team System

2009-04-10T16:12:34Z

This month I called Doug Seven and Daniel Norwood to talk about the work Quest are doing to provide Oracle support inside Visual Studio team System 2010. Doug Seven is a Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft focused on technical advocacy of Team System as an ALM solution and Daniel Norwood is a Product Manager for Quest Software.

We talk about the work Quest is doing to enable Oracle support inside of Team System and the functionality that this makes available inside the IDE when you are doing database development.

Head over to the Radio TFS site to listen to the show, and don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes or Zune. You can visit the TeamFuze site for more information on the Quest product.

Have a good Easter – I’m off to eat chocolate.

Virtual Team System User Group coming to Europe with Brian Harry

2009-04-08T12:14:21Z

The Virtual Team System User Group is great for people like me that live somewhat removed from a major population centre. In fact, as I look out my window I can’t even see the sheep that usually live outside. That’s one of the reasons why I love the Virtual Team System User Group as it allows me to meet up with people just like I would do at a normal user group session – without the risk of catching a cold or consuming cold pizza. The only problem with the user group so far is that it has been meeting in the evenings US time – which is in the middle of the night for me.

Well, fellow MVP Thomas Schissler has come to the rescue and is organizing a bunch of Virtual User Group meetings at European friendly times. He’s got off to a great start by getting the father of TFS, Brian Harry, to speak on April 16th.

Keynote: Visual Studio Team System Adoption at Microsoft with Brian Harry
Meeting Date: Thursday, April 16, 2009
Time: 18:00 UTC (11:00AM PDT)
Location: Microsoft Island in Second Life / LiveMeeting

For those of you who don’t know Brian, Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and serves as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. In 1996 Brian and a few others began working on the problem of improving the approachability of our API for the developer masses. Although this started as investigating ways to extend COM it eventually grew into what we now know of as a little thing called the .NET Framework. For a couple of years, Brian was the Development manager for the Common Language Runtime and then served as the Product Unit Manager through the rest of the V1 and most of the V1.1 product cycle. In 2002 Brian opened a remote development center in North Carolina and formed the Team Foundation Server team.

Anyway – even if you are not in Europe, I’d encourage you to join me in attending this session. I’ll be hanging out later if anyone wants a chat (I’ll be the one wearing a tux as I like to dress smart in a virtual setting).

Catching up with MIX09

2009-03-26T12:54:53Z

Sadly, I couldn't go along to MIX this year. However luckily for me, Microsoft has followed a new trend with its conferences and made all the sessions available online for free for everyone to access. As well as being able to browse the sessions online, Mike Swanson has posted a comprehensive list of all the sessions on his blog. However, I like to download them all so that I have them locally and can watch them on the move (sat in airplanes or doing jobs around the house etc). Therefore I created the following text file containing links to all the downloads so that I can copy the list of sessions into the excellent Free Download Manager to download them in the background over the next few days. I thought that others might find the file useful so here it is:

mix09_content.txt (32KB)

Also, Mike has created a very handy MIX09 Renamer batch file (4.17KB) that can rename all the downloaded sessions to put the session title on them making them much easier to browse and find later. For more information on this batch file see Mike's post.

If you use iTunes or Zune, then you can also subscribe to the MIX09 podcast feeds to download all the sessions to those devices (iPod/iPhone Friendly Feed, Zune Friendly Feed).

So far I am working my way through the sessions. The Bill Buxton keynote is great, and I'm very excited about the new SketchFlow stuff in Blend. Also - be sure to download session C02F - Improving UX through ALM (with Chris Bernard and Christian Thilmany) as they do a great job of showing the integration between the designer and the developer using TFS. They also spend a good deal of time in Teamprise on the Mac :-)

New Radio TFS Episode on Adopting Team System with Steven Borg

2009-03-25T20:40:43Z

Earlier this month I spent a very pleasant evening at the beautiful home of Steven Borg and recorded the chat we had about adopting Team System in the real world for this months episode of Radio TFS.

Steven Borg is the founder of Northwest Cadence, a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner focused on Visual Studio Team System. He was selected as a VSTS MVP in the first round back in 2005, and has been a Team System MVP even since. He’s little ‘a’ agile, and big on understanding what makes successful development teams tick. If you’re coming out to TechEd, be sure to head out a day early for his pre-con covering 5 ways real companies have gotten the most out of Team System. Visit his blog at http://blog.nwcadence.com to learn more!

Play Now: Adopting Team System with Steven Borg

Big thanks to Michael Ruminer for lending me his fancy Marantz audio recorder which made this show possible.

Team System MVP of the Year

2009-03-07T22:14:53Z

This week I have been in Seattle for the MVP Summit 2009. It has been a busy week chatting with the Team System team and catching up with all my friends from the MVP community around the world.

I have to admit that, without doubt, my proudest moment of the week (and also the first time I think I have blushed in a while) was when it was announced that I had won the first ever Team System MVP of the Year award. I am deeply honoured particularly because it was the 100 or so other VSTS MVP’s that made the decision. As part of my “prize” I got a shiny belt buckle that I’ve been proudly showing off to anyone that will listen. Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller were even kind enough to have me on their “This Week on Channel 9” show when I popped round to show off my award.

Take a look at the This Week on Channel 9 Episode, and don’t forget to subscribe to the show. When they don’t have me on it is usually a very entertaining 30 minute re-cap of the weeks events in the .NET world.