To change the theme, go to Window, Preferences, General, Appearance and select Windows 7.  This looks a lot better on my Windows 8 Release Preview machine as shown below.

Now, one of the great things about e4 is that it is skinnable using CSS.  I thought I’d knock up a quick stylesheet to get rid of the gradient in the toolbar and tidy up a few other little things.  It’s also really easy to define a theme as part of the plugin.xml and only have it apply to people running Windows 8 – simply add the following (note the condition on OS version of 6.2):

<extension
   point="org.eclipse.e4.ui.css.swt.theme">
  
   <theme

         basestylesheeturi="css/e4_default_win8.css"

         id="org.eclipse.e4.ui.css.theme.e4_default"

         label="Windows 8 Desktop"

         os="win32"

         os_version="6.2">

   </theme>

</extension>

This is what my Windows 8 theme for Juno currently looks like against explorer:

Needs a bit of playing with (for example, I’ve noticed that swapping themes in Eclipse works a lot better if you explicitly override things like the background images that have been used previously in themes in that Eclipse session rather than just leaving them not set).  What do you think?  If you are interested the CSS is below but it’s just a subtly changed version of the default win7 theme.

@import url('e4_basestyle.css');

.MTrimmedWindow { 

    background-color: #EFF6FE; 

}

.MPartStack {

    font-size: 9;

    font-family: 'Segoe UI';

    swt-simple: true;

    swt-mru-visible: false;

}
.MTrimBar {

    background-color: #EFF6FE; 

}
.MToolControl.TrimStack {

    frame-image:  url("./win7TSFrame.png");

    handle-image:  url("./win7Handle.png");

}
.MPartStack.active {

    swt-unselected-tabs-color: #F3F9FF #D0DFEE #CEDDED #CEDDED #D2E1F0 #D2E1F0 #FFFFFF 20% 45% 60% 70% 100% 100%;

    swt-outer-keyline-color: #B6BCCC;

}
#PerspectiveSwitcher  {

    background-color: #E1E6F6 #EFF6FE 100%;

}
#org-eclipse-ui-editorss {

   swt-tab-renderer: url('bundleclass://org.eclipse.e4.ui.workbench.renderers.swt/org.eclipse.e4.ui.workbench.renderers.swt.CTabRendering');

   swt-unselected-tabs-color: #F0F0F0 #F0F0F0 #F0F0F0 100% 100%;

   swt-outer-keyline-color: #B4B4B4;

   swt-inner-keyline-color: #F0F0F0;

   swt-tab-outline: #F0F0F0;

   color: #F0F0F0;

   swt-tab-height: 8px;

   padding: 0px 5px 7px;

}
CTabFolder.MArea .MPartStack, CTabFolder.MArea .MPartStack.active {

   swt-shadow-visible: false;

}
CTabFolder Canvas {

  background-color: #F8F8F8;

}

Anyway, lesson from this is to at least change the theme in Juno on Windows 8 from Windows XP Blue to the Windows 7. The jury is still out on my customized stylesheet above – I’m sure someone with some actual design skills could do better.

While he’ll be speaking at a lot of user groups and Microsoft events in various cities, places are filling up fast.  However there is still some availability in a few cities.  If you are nearby or know someone who is then I encourage you to register and come along.

Austin TX

• Monday April 4 (Information)

Minneapolis

• Wednesday April 6 (Details soon)

Chicago

• Thursday April 7 2:00pm – 4.30pm (Register)
• Thursday April 7 6:30pm - 8:30pm (Register)

Milwaukee

• Friday April 8 9:00am – 11:30am (Register)

Well, I’m proud to say that we’ve continued the tradition and you can now use Team Explorer Everywhere with CodePlex.  Simply download the trial edition of Team Explorer Everywhere and then enter the license key given on the CodePlex wiki.  Note that if you already have a full license to Team Explorer Everywhere (either through retail, volume licensing or MSDN) then you can obviously use this to access CodePlex as well.

Just a quick tip.  When adding the connection, be sure to hop over to the Advanced tab to ensure that you do not have “tfs” in your path.  CodePlex has it’s TFS servers at the root of the server location (as required by older TFS clients and older versions of TFS) – but the Team Explorer Everywhere client will default to the TFS 2010 convention of looking at https://servername/tfs unless you tell it differently.  Also some of SSL certificates on some of the CodePlex servers are signed by a root certification authority that is not in the Java Certificate Store in all Java Runtime Environments running today.  If you run into this problem and you are having SSL issues then you can add the root CA to your Java certificate store.  An easier way is to un-check the “Accept only trusted SSL certificates” which will disable the root certification authority check for the SSL connection to the CodePlex server – but bear in mind that reduces the security of the communication between your machine and the CodePlex server.

Let me know how you get on.  I’m excited to see who takes us up on this offer.  As an encouragement, I’ll send a free copy of my book to the first person who emails me a screenshot of them contributing to a project on CodePlex using Team Explorer Everywhere.

Team Explorer Everywhere contains the following components:

• Team Foundation Server plug-in for Eclipse
• Cross-platform command-line client for Team Foundation Server
• Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010

I’ll post more about what functionality is included in this release, but first I wanted to talk about what this means to existing Teamprise customers.

Teamprise customers should have already got a couple of emails from the company. If you haven’t then head on over to the following site for more information (http://www.microsoft.com/pathways/teamprise).  Basically when Microsoft shipped it’s first release, Teamprise ceased sales of the existing products and will begin the process of wrapping up the company.  Microsoft will be the contact point from now on for all purchases and support enquiries.

Teamprise 3.0 customers are entitled to a free upgrade to the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 version.  You can find out the full details of eligibility and how to claim this license at the following page on the pathways site (http://www.microsoft.com/pathways/teamprise/Teamprise%20v3.x.htm).

If you are a new customer, you’ll be please to know that Team Explorer Everywhere is now also included in the Ultimate level MSDN subscription and is also available as a standalone product for folks without the top tier MSDN Subscription (or indeed without any MSDN Subscription).

If you have any questions of feedback about all this then the pathways site has contact details.  You can also discuss things over on our MSDN Forum.

Working on Teamprise has un-doubtably been the highlight of my career prior to joining Microsoft, and I have to confess to at having a tinge of sadness that the brand we created in our little start-up is going away.  That said all the developers who worked on the product came over to Microsoft and were part of the team that got this new release under the Microsoft banner out the door.  We all worked long hours to ensure that the new version was able to take advantage of many of the TFS 2010 features and I’m very proud of what we managed to accomplish since November.  Also, we’re obviously not stopping there.  Since shipping the initial release we’ve continued development and are hoping to keep getting more functionality out the door.  In addition, now that we are part of the core Team Foundation Server team we get to influence the future direction of the product in ways that I cannot even predict at this time.  The TFS team were always very good at listening to our feedback from a cross-platform point of view – but now we’re all part of the same team we’re even harder to forget :-)

But more on all this soon.  I’ve been so busy helping get Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 shipped along-side the rest of the Visual Studio 2010 release that I’ve been neglecting my blogging and podcasting duties.  But it’s great to be back!

Many people have done a double-take at the company name on my badge this week – especially when I start bemoaning the difficulties of doing a headless PDE build or paging tables of data containing thousands of rows in an efficient manner via SWT virtual tables.  People are generally pleasantly surprised but intrigued and also pleased that Microsoft has developers using and developing for Eclipse.

So, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be giving my personal view on “The Life and Times of an Eclipse Developer at Microsoft Corporation”.  I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about my talk.  Usually when I’m talking I’m discussing the intricacies of Team Foundation Server or best practices in software development – topics that I’m comfortable with.  When it comes to Eclipse I’m clearly just an average developer and not the expert in the room.  Heck, I’m not even an expert with-in my own team.  I guess I have the advantage of being the only Eclipse developer in the room that works for Microsoft so at least the title of the talk helps :-)

Wish me luck.  If you are at EclipseCon then drop by the booth before or after the session to give me abuse and I’ll give you a pack of planning poker cards or some interoperability mints (gotta love conference schwag).

However, in the past we used “Teamprise” to mean different things.  For example we have “Teamprise” views in Eclipse.  When you whent to import a project from Team Foundation Server you selected “Teamprise”.  Sometimes we used Teamprise as a product name, sometimes as a metaphor for accessing TFS. Sometimes we used it under the covers as well – for example as the name of an annotation in version control when storing check-in polices or as the layout type when doing work item forms. 

This was a deliberate decision at Teamprise.  When we started we were just a plucky start-up convinced that we were one of many working to put TFS into Eclipse.  We wanted to make our name synonymous with accessing TFS from Eclipse so that people would think of us instead of a competitor.  But we also wanted to allow competing products to exist in the same Eclipse installation so that users had choice as to which TFS connector they used and it wasn’t too confusing for them.  Largely this was a success.  We got a solution to market at the right time and managed to keep improving the technology and a competing product never really appeared.  To people who know Team Foundation Server, Teamprise == TFS in Eclipse and Teamprise == TFS cross-platform.

But, there was a whole world of people that we didn’t reach.  People would always need to know to ask “How do I connect to TFS from Eclipse, or How do I connect to TFS from the Mac” and be given the answer of Teamprise (either by a person or a search engine).

Now that we are part of the Team Foundation Server team, it doesn’t make sense to be as “visible” anymore as a brand in the UI.  When you are connecting to Team Foundation Server in Eclipse or want to see Team Foundation Server resources – you should look for Team Foundation Server.  When looking for how to connect to TFS from Eclipse, you should look for the product that contains a “Team Foundation Server plug-in for Eclipse”.  It is now Team Foundation Server we want you to connect with (both literally, and from a branding perspective).  All this means that it is more complicated than just doing a search/replace in the UI as now we need to figure out when we were using Teamprise to talk about TFS and when we were using it to talk about the software that you plug-in to Eclipse.

And then there was package renaming.  All of our code used to be in com.teamprise packages.  Some classes were called things like “TeampriseLogConfiguration” etc etc.  In each case decisions had to be made on individual merit rather than being able to come up with a simple automated cookie cutter approach.

The following is what we ended up with:

• In the UI, when talking about connecting to Team Foundation Server use that name and the TFS icon.
• Packages moved from com.teamprise.* to com.microsoft.tfs.*.
• Class names sometimes went from Teamprise* to TFS* or TEE* depending on use, or got a different name entirely.
• Eclipse plug-ins moved from com.teamprise.* to com.microsoft.tfs.*.   We also took the chance to do some refactoring here to make the plug-in names more sensible now that the codebase is much more mature and the roles and responsibilities of each plug-in is better defined than it was back at V1.0 of Teamprise when some of them were originally created.
• Extension points moved from com.teamprise.* to the appropriate plug-in com.microsoft.tfs.* based name.  This is important if you were previously using the Teamprise extension points to add integration into our plug-in from yours.  I’ve spoken to the customers and partners that I knew of that were doing this – however I expect more will want to once we make the initial Microsoft release and so we wanted to get the naming right now.
• Check-in policies keep their Teamprise based annotation names in version control.  This fact is totally transparent to end users, but means that we retain backwards compatibility with older Teamprise client defined check-in policies.  It also means that partners like JetBrains who have their own check-in policy implementation in the IntelliJ IDE that uses the “Teamprise” scoped mechanism for check-in policy storage need not change their code.
• The .tpattributes file lives on as the file that is used to store unix execute bit permissions etc, the .tpignore file lives on as the file you can use to specify resources that Eclipse should ignore.  Again this was for backwards compatibility.  We could have gone down a route where we searched for “.tfsignore” first etc but we’re hoping to be able to reduce the need for these files at some point in the future by making use of the new properties capabilities in TFS 2010 so we decided to leave alone.
• In the work item layout target names, “Teamprise” used to be the name of a layout target that was for the Teamprise client.  “Teamprise” is still accepted (for back-compat) but a layout with the target name “JavaSWT” now takes preference.  Therefore when we are looking for a layout target in Eclipse we look for one called:
  
1. “JavaSWT”, followed by
2. “Teamprise” followed by
3. “WinForms”, followed by
4. the last unspecified layout. 

If all this talk of layouts doesn’t mean anything to you then do not worry.  Neno has a good post here where he talks about using separate layouts for Web Access and Visual Studio where you will get the idea.

Hope that makes sense, we will have a beta out soon where you can take a look for yourself.  The moral of this story is that if you have to re-brand your codebase due to acquisition then be prepared that it will take more thought and effort than you might have originally estimated.

We are now after one more person to join our little family. We need someone to help us with our User Education work.  If you know of a technical writer that might be interested in working with us then please send them over to this job posting at Microsoft Careers (https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=2&jid=10007&jlang=EN). This role is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

I promise you, it is a very exciting time to be joining our team.  I am looking forward to showing you a bit more of what we have been working on soon!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.