I posted a new version of the year planner that shows the current calendar year, alongside the Financial (April – March) and Academic (September – August) year.  You can get a version that shows the current calendar year along with the previous and next year here (which is the version that I use).  Judging by the feedback, other people find this spreadsheet year planner helpful too – do let me know if you find yourself using it.

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)

.NET Rocks #615: Martin Woodward Brings Team Foundation Server to Everyone!

Anyway, it’s always fun talking with the guys but hopefully it turned out to be an interesting enough podcast.  Let me know what you think!

The various templates for year planners I had in Office 2010 were not quite what I like, and I couldn’t find a simple year planner for 2011 around online so I knocked up a quick spreadsheet that will generate a year planner for me.  Simply rename a sheet to a different year and the sheet will change to be the year planner for that year.  The whole thing is formula based using conditional formatting, no macros etc.

Thought I’d post it to my blog as others might find this useful along with the year planners generated by my spreadsheet for 2010, 2011 and 2012.  Note that there is some funky date/time math in these sheets so they come with the “works on my machine” guarantee – results when printing outside of the UK might vary…

• YearPlanner.xlsx
• YearPlanner_2010.pdf
• YearPlanner_2011.pdf
• YearPlanner_2012.pdf

Let me know if you find them useful.

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!

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.

Since September 2003 I’ve been posting to my blog in every month.  I join Microsoft in November 2009 and then all goes quiet…  As you might be able to guess, things are a little busy here.  Not just with joining the company but also because I’ve had an alternative outlet for my thoughts. 

I’ve been writing a book with my friends Mickey Gousett, Brian Keller and Ajoy Krishnamoorthy.  Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 is now complete and on the way to the printers.  With any luck it will be available from all good book stores shortly after the launch of Visual Studio 2010, but you can pre-order your copy now if you want to guarantee a copy of the first edition :-)

But enough pimping of my book – what else have I been up to for the past three months?

Joining Microsoft has been fun.  Perhaps the most surprising aspect for me was how in many ways it doesn’t feel that different (which is a credit to the people who brought us into the company).  I’ll always look back on the Teamprise days with fondness and I miss the people back in the office in Champaign, but all the developers came over to Microsoft from Teamprise at the same time so I’ve plenty of company. Unlike the rest of the Teamprise developers, I still work in the same place (my house in rural Northern Ireland).  I still talk to the same people at Microsoft - we had a very close relationship for years before a decision to make the acquisition was made.  Now at Microsoft, we’ve grown the team with some excellent people (some of the best developers and testers I have ever worked with in my career).  After joining in November and getting the announcement out the way, the rest of the time has just been a blur of late nights coding away as we strive to get the initial Microsoft release ready.  As well as getting TFS 2010 feature support we needed we’ve also had to completely re-brand the product (more on that in another post) and get our code through the various processes internally in Microsoft that have been developed over the years.  While Microsoft are experts at shipping software, they haven’t done that many plug-ins for Eclipse before so we’ve had to break new ground.  So far everyone has been very helpful and being the Eclipse project out of the Visual Studio team sure helps you get your name remembered :-)

The current plan is to ship a limited preview release in a few weeks to let people give us feedback on what we have been working on.  This will also let us have a practise run through the ship process all the way to the end so that we can figure out what we need to fix on that side ready for the RTM.

Between now and the beta release I’m going to try and post about some of the decisions that we have had to make about what we could and couldn’t get into this release along with the interesting challenges re-branding gave us.  Closer to the beta release I’ll show some of the shiny new features along with some of the improvements under the hood that we’d been working on for a while that had always been targeted for the “4.0” version of Teamprise and so never saw the light of day in the 3.X branch that is the basis of what people know and love today.

If there is anything else you want to hear about let me know.  The book is done now so looking forward to getting back to blogging.  I’ve plenty of material from the past 3 months to keep me busy for a while.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.