How Steve Got Burned Today

Using the Nugetter CodePlex project with TFS 2012 build throws TF215097 error

2013-05-01T18:39:00.001-04:00

Problem While working with a client recently I came across an issue that I think needs to be better documented. We were implementing Nuget packaging in their TFS 2012 build process. I knew from...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

How To: Create an offline installer for Visual Studio from a Web Installer

2013-03-30T14:27:00.001-04:00

Synopsis If you have the need to download the complete set of files for a given Visual Studio update so that you can burn them to media or place them on an internal network share for distribution,...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

TFS 2012 Quick Note: How to add text formatting and line breaks to the DEFAULT text of a work item field

2013-03-06T18:33:00.001-05:00

This is a quick note so that I can find this in the future. What: There are times when you want modify a work item so that the value of an HTML string field, like the Description field on a...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Community TFS Report Extensions open-source reports hits v1.0 milestone

2013-01-22T22:03:00.001-05:00

Microsoft ALM MVP Tommy Norman and I have been working on creating a set of reports that fill some of the gaps in the TFS 2010 out-of-box process templates. The output of this effort is the...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

VS 2012 - Coded UI Tests (CUIT) Now Automatically Closes Browser or App Upon Test Completion

2012-12-23T11:59:00.001-05:00

Synopsis Microsoft changed the behavior of Coded UI Tests between Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012. The change is that the browser window or app window being used for the test case...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Team Foundation Service is open to the public (and free!)

2012-06-11T11:56:00.001-04:00

The Visual Studio Team has hit another major milestone in the evolution of Team Foundation Server. Back at the BUILD conference last year they announce a hosted TFS offering called Team Foundation...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

How do I know if I have all of the Visual Studio 2010 Updates?

2012-05-07T10:24:00.001-04:00

Whenever I go to a customer site to perform a TFS installation or upgrade, one of the questions I invariably get from the IT team is “What has to be installed on everyone’s machines to use TFS? I...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010–New and little-know features–Part 5–Better Unit Tests

2012-04-19T23:58:00.001-04:00

Table of Contents for this series. I occasionally give a talk about “Driving Quality through the Development Process”.. One of the things I try to drive home with developers is that you can’t test...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010–New and little-know features–Part 4–Code Snippets

2012-04-14T00:11:00.001-04:00

Table of Contents for this series. Code Snippets Code Snippets have been around since Visual Studio 2005 so I’m amazed when I show the functionality to developers that have been using Visual Studio...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010–New and little-know features–Part 3–IntelliSense Improvements

2012-04-13T22:51:00.001-04:00

Table of Contents for this series. Sometimes it’s the most subtle improvements that make the biggest difference to your productivity. Some of these subtle improvements falls into the “Search” and...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

TFS 2010 with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise SP1–Excel Dashboards do not display anything

2012-04-12T17:37:00.001-04:00

I was working with a client recently and got burned by a SharePoint 2010 SP1 Excel Services bug that I’d like to document here. This bug is known and has been fixed by Microsoft, but finding the...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Found on MSDN: Visual Studio 11 to Visual Studio 2010 Project Compatibility

2012-04-10T12:16:00.001-04:00

This post is mostly so that I can find this information quickly in the future. One of the big issues that all development teams have face when working on the Microsoft Development tool s stack is...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010–New and little-know features–Part 2–Code Metrics

2012-04-09T19:08:00.001-04:00

Table of Contents for this series. Code Metrics in Visual Studio What is it? One of the really nice features that shipped with Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate is the Code Metrics tooling....

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010–New and little-know features–Part 1–Column selection

2012-04-06T23:17:00.001-04:00

Table of Contents for this series. One of the really cool, productivity-boosting but little-known features in the Visual Studio IDEs (since VS 2005) is the Column selection (aka Box selection)...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010–New and little-know features–Table of Contents

2012-04-06T21:13:00.000-04:00

This post is a set of links to all of the posts in the Visual Studio 2010 – New and little-known features series. I’ve been teaching Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for Developers classes on and off...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Where to find TFS and Visual Studio 2010 Updates

2012-03-23T12:47:00.001-04:00

This post is mostly for my own reference. I’m always needing to find the links to the current updates for VS and TFS 2010. Brian Harry has written a blog post that describes the new release model...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Team Explorer Everywhere is now Free…and more!!!

2012-03-08T23:14:00.001-05:00

Ok, so some big news has come out of Microsoft. The folks on the Visual Studio team have reviewed their licensing and have made more stuff free (as in “free beer”). 1. As of today, Team Explorer...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

How To: Install Microsoft Team Foundation Server “11” Express

2012-03-08T18:57:00.001-05:00

I decided to try something a little different this time. Instead of creating a multi-post series with the steps involved, I just fired up Camtasia 7.1 and recorded the process. So 15 minutes of...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

TFS 2008–New Area Path values are not available in work items

2011-02-28T14:16:00.001-05:00

PROBLEM: I recently worked with a client to migrate his TFS users from one active directory domain to a new one. The TFS remained in the old domain, just the user accounts moved. During the...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Found on MSDN #2: Compatibility between TFS Clients and TFS 2010

2011-02-03T17:10:00.001-05:00

The January 2011 Refresh of the MSDN Library site has gone live. One of the new articles is a pretty thorough run down of the compatibility between different Team Foundation Clients (i.e. Team...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Fully TFS 2010-compliant TFSAdmin tool now available on CodePlex

2010-12-20T10:39:00.001-05:00

The TFSAdmin team has finished a version of the highly useful TFSAdmin tool built entirely on the TFS 2010 object model. Version 2.1 fixes an issue that required the user to install Team Explorer...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Test Attachment Cleaner Power Tool released

2010-12-08T17:16:00.001-05:00

The folks on the Microsoft Testing Tools team have given us another “out of band” release. This time it’s the Test Attachment Cleaner Power Tool. “Overview: In Visual Studio 2010, with the...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Found on MSDN #1: Walkthrough: Define a Custom Workflow to Deploy a Database from Team Foundation Build

2010-09-03T23:37:00.001-04:00

I’m starting a new occasional series here that points out some of the goodness that is the new MSDN Library. The folks on the Visual Studio team have done a really nice job updating the docs and...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management now available

2010-08-19T16:33:00.001-04:00

Just found out that Microsoft has released the Lab Management bits. They are now available from MSDN and are included as “additional software” on your MSDN subscription…meaning there is no...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

How does Network Isolation in VS Lab Management work?

2010-07-28T15:38:00.001-04:00

The other day I had a client ask me to describe how Network Isolation is accomplished in Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management. Of course I had never looked that deep, so I quickly responded (in my best...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]