TFS on blog.ehn.nu

New Swedish Meetup Group for Microsoft ALM and DevOps

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 09:59:53 +0000

We have decided that it is time to create a meetup group for people that are interested in the Microsoft ALM and DevOps story!

Together with Mathias Olausson and a few other people we have created a new Meetup group and announced the first meeting.

Our plan is to continue meeting every month or so to learn about and dicuss new concept and ideas in the area of ALRM and DevOps on the Microsoft stack. This is a wide area, which spans all roles in the development process,
so there will be something for everyone.

TFS 2015 Update 2 RC1 Available – With VS Release Management vNext

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 08:34:33 +0000

Today Brian Harry announced that the first release of TFS 2015 Update 2 is available. It is an RC with a go-live license, which means that Microsoft will support you if you install it in production, and it will be a direct supported upgrade to RTM once it is released.

Read the full release notes for Update 2 RC1 here: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/tfs2015-update2-vs

One huge thing with the release is that Update 2 includes the new Release Management vNext feature that has up until now only been available in the service (although you can use that for on premise TFS and deployments). But now you don’t have to rely on VSTS for hosting the service, it is now part of TFS 2015 Update 2!

Deploy Azure Web Apps with Parameterization

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:12:05 +0000

I have blogged before about how to deploy an Azure Web App using the new build system in TFS 2015/Visual Studio Team Services. In addition to configure an Azure service endpoint, it is really only a matter of using the built-in Azure Web App Deployment task.

However, in many cases I have decided not to use this task myself since it has been lacking a key feature: Applying deployment parameters using the SetParameter.xml file.

Downloading Build Artifacts in TFS Build vNext

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 19:14:31 +0000

Since a couple of months back, Microsoft new Release Management service is available in public preview in Visual Studio Team Services. According to the current time plan, it will be released for on-premise TFS in the next update (Update 2).

Using a tool like release management allows you to implement a deployment pipeline by grabbing the binaries and any other artifacts from your release build, and then deploy them across different environments with the proper configuration and approval workflow. Building your binaries once and only once is a fundamental principal of implementing continuous delivery, too much can go wrong if you build your application every time you deploy it into a new environment.

New Book – Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio ALM 2015

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 20:12:35 +0000

With today’s announcement at Microsoft Connect() about the public preview of the next generation of Visual Studio Release Management, it is also time to announce the (imminent) release of a new book that covers among other things this new version of RM.

Me and my fellow ALM MVP Mathias Olausson have been working hard during the last 6 months on this book, using early alpha and beta versions of this brand new version of Visual Studio Release Management. Writing about a changing platform can be rather challenging, and our publisher (Apress) have been very patient with us regarding delays and late changes!

10 Features in Team Foundation Server that you maybe didn’t know about

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 17:37:23 +0000

I often talk to different teams about how they work with Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online. I get a lot of questions about different features, and some of them tend to come up more often than other. So here is a list of 10 features in TFS that I get questions about regularly or that I have noticed a lot of teams don’t know about. It is by no means exhaustive, and it is a mixture of smaller and larger features, but hopefully you will find something here that you didn’t know about before.

Generate custom build numbers in TFS Build vNext

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 23:15:12 +0000

By now, many of you should have had the chance to at least play with the new build system that was released in TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Online. Here is an introductory post I wrote about it when it entered public preview back in January.

Doing the basic stuff is very easy using the new build system, especially if you compare it with the old one, which is now referred to as XAML builds. Creating and customizing build definitions is just a matter of adding the tasks that you want to use and configure them properly, everything is done using the web interface that is part of the TFS Web Access.

Building GitHub repositories in TFS Build vNext

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 12:53:08 +0000

In the brave new world of Microsoft where a lot of the frameworks and languages that they build now are open sourced over at GitHub, it comes as no surprise that GitHub is nicely integrated into both
Visual Studio and TFS Build vNext. This makes it very easy to setup builds that gets the source code from your GitHub repo but uses TFS Build vNext to build it. It also allows you to setup CI builds, that is
builds that trigger automatically when someone does a commit in the corresponding Git repo.

Deploying an Azure Web Site using TFS Build vNext

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 21:58:32 +0000

TFS 2015 is around the corner, and with it comes a whole new build system. All the biggest pain points from the existing build system (now called “XAML builds”) are gone and instead we get a light weight build system with a web UI that makes it very easy to customize our build processes and that doesn’t perform a lot of magic such as redirecting your build output for example.

In this post, I will show you just how easy it is to setup a build that builds a standard ASP.NET web application, generates a web deploy package as part of the build and then pick up this package and deploys it to a Azure web site.
As part of this, you will also see how smooth the integration with Azure is when it comes to connecting your subscription.

Trigger Releases in Visual Studio Release Management

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 15:22:04 +0000

In my previous post, I showed how you can trigger a release in Visual Studio Release Management from a TeamCity build step.

When Visual Studio Release Management 2013 RTM’ed, it came with customized TFS build templates that made it easy to trigger a release from a TFVC or Git build in TFS. These build templates relied on the ReleaseManagementBuild command line client, so it required the VSRM client being installed on the build server.

TFS Build vNext – A Preview

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:00:35 +0000

Currently, Microsoft is working hard on a complete rewrite of the TFS Build system. They announced this, among other things, at the Connect event back in November and did a short demo of it. It is not yet available, but as part of the MVP program, a few of us has now been fortunate enough to get access to an early preview of the new build system.

Note: This version is in pre-alpha state, meaning that a lot of things can and will change until the final version!

Trigger Visual Studio Release Management vNext from TeamCity

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:56:58 +0000

The last couple of updates to Visual Studio has included a lot of new functionality for Visual Studio Release Management. The biggest one is the introduction of so called vNext releases, that leverages Powershell DSC for carrying out the provisioning and deployments of environments and applications.

Also included in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 was the introduction of a REST API that allows us to both trigger new releases and read back information about them. This API is only available for vNext release templates, and will probably not be implemented for the “old” agentbased deployments.

Copy TFS Build Definitions between Projects and Collections

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 14:50:54 +0000

The last couple of years it has become apparent that using multiple team projects in TFS is generally a bad idea. There are of course exceptions to this, but there are a lot ot things that becomes much easier to do when you put all of your projects and team in the same team project.

Fellow ALM MVP Martin Hinshelwood has blogged about this several times, as well as other people in the community. In particular, using the backlog and portfolio management tools makes much more sense when everything is located in the same team project.

TFS Build: NuGet.exe was not found in the expected location

Wed, 07 May 2014 20:43:39 +0000

Problem

One of our customers recently had a problem with NuGet restore when they created a new build template, based on the standard TfvcTemplate.12.xaml template. In TFS 2013, package restore is done automatically by the default build templates.

It is configured as part of the RunMSBuild activity, where you can enable and disable this by setting the EnableNuGetPackageRestore property:

However, when we were executing the builds we got the following warning in the build log:

Creating a Build Definition using the TFS 2013 API

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:55:13 +0000

Almost four years ago I wrote a post on how to create a build definition programmatically using the TFS 2010 API. The code is partyl still valid, but since a lot of the information in a build definition is dependent on the build process template, the code in the blog
does not work properly for the TFS 2013 default build templates. In addition, since the introduction of Git in TFS 2013, there are some other differences in how you create a build definition for a Git team project compared to a TFVC team project.

Getting started with InRelease and TFS 2013 Preview

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 15:35:16 +0000

As you probably already know, Microsoft recently acquired InRelease, a release management product build by InCycle software that integrates tightly with Team Foundation Server. This acquisition fills a huge gap in the Visual Studio ALM suite, letting customers handle the release management and automatic deployment of their solution. This is a crucial feature for enabling Continuous Deployment.

In this post I will show you how to get started with using InRelease, by installing it and setting up your first release including automatic deployment to a staging server. I expect to blog some more about InRelease in the near future, looking at the nitty gritty details of release automation and deployment using InRelease.

New Book: Pro Team Foundation Service

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:27:33 +0000

The last couple of months I have been working together with Mathias Olausson, Mattias Sköld and Joachim Rossberg on a new book project for Apress that has just been published. The book is called Pro Team Foundation Service and covers all aspects of working with Team Foundation Service, Microsoft’s hosted version of Team Foundation Server in the cloud. I have mainly worked on the chapter related to automated build and continuous deployment, but also with some of the other chapters.

Extending Team Explorer 2012 – Associating Recent Work Items

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:29:44 +0000

Extension available at: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/9ed2d30c-a692-42b0-a21d-cdc8d2bf322c

I have been playing around a bit lately with extending Team Explorer 2012, mostly because it is fun but also to fix a little nagging feature that should have been there from the beginning. Often I (and a lot of other people) find myself wanting to associate several consecutive changesets to the same work item. The problem is that Team Explorer does not remember this, instead I have to either remember the ID or use a query that hopefully will match the work item.

TFS Build: Running Static Code Analysis for Specific Configuration

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:54:47 +0000

Running Static Code Analysis (SCA) is something that you should be doing regularly to verify your code base against a large set of rules that will check your code for potential problems and how it comply with standard patterns such as naming conventions for example. Microsoft include several different rule sets that you can use for starters, but you can build your own rule sets as well, that contain the rule that you want to use, In addition, you can write your own custom rules and add these to your rule sets.

Book “Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter” published!

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:33:42 +0000

During the summer and fall this year, me and my colleague Terje Sandstrøm has worked together on a book project that has now finally hit the stores!
The title of the book is Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter and is published by Packt Publishing.

You can find it at http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-starter/book or from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688389

The book is part of a concept that Packt have with starter-books, intended for people new to Team Foundation Server 2012 and who want a quick guideline to get it up and working. It covers the fundamentals, from installing and configuring it, and how to use it with source control, work items and builds. It is done as a step-by-step guide, but also includes best practices advice in the different areas. It covers the use of both the on-premises and the TFS Services version. It also has a list of links and references in the end to the most relevant Visual Studio 2012 ALM sites.

Get Started using Build-Deploy-Test Workflow with TFS 2012

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:39:47 +0000

TFS 2012 introduces a new type of Lab environment called Standard Environment. This allows you to setup a full Build Deploy Test (BDT) workflow that will build your application, deploy it to your target machine(s) and then run a set of tests on that server to verify the deployment. In TFS 2010, you had to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager and involve half of your IT department to get going. Now all you need is a server (virtual or physical) where you want to deploy and test your application. You don’t even have to install a test agent on the machine, TFS 2012 will do this for you!

New functionality in TFS Build Manager – Managing Triggers and Build Resources

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:28:36 +0000

Yesterday we pushed out a new release (August 2012) of the Community TFS Build Extension, including a new version of the Community TFS Build Manager (1.0.4.6)

The two big new features in the Build Manager in this release are:
Set Triggers
It is now possible to select one or more build definitions and update the triggers for them in one simple operation: \

You’ll note that we have started collapsing the context menu a bit, the list of commands are getting long! 🙂

New VS2012 Book: Pro Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 21:57:13 +0000

During the spring/summer I have been involved with reviewing a new book about Visual Studio 2012 ALM from Apress called “Pro Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012”

The book is written by a fellow Visual Studio ALM MVP Mathias Olausson and his colleague Joachim Rossberg. It is a very comprehensive book that covers both all aspects of ALM in general and also how to implement these practices with Visual Studio 2012. The book also has several chapters dedicated to measuring your improvements by using ALM assessments and metrics.

ALM Rangers Readiness GIG has shipped!

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:38:39 +0000

Together with todays announcement that Visual Studio 2012 as been officially released, the ALM Rangers have also simultaneously shipped (“sim-shipped”) a massive set of solutions for feature gaps and value-add guidance for the ALM community.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/08/15/welcome-to-visual-studio-2012-alm-rangers-readiness-wave.aspx

You can find a complete list of ALM Ranger solutions here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee358787

I have been a part of the Team Foundation Build Customization Guide, which have been updated with new features in Visual Studio 2012, as well as the top requested features from the first version of the guidance. As part of this guidance, we have also developed the Community TFS Build Manager, a Visual Studio extension that simplifies a lot of tasks when working with TFS Build. It now exist both for Visual Studio 2012 as well as for Visual Studio 2010. I’d like to thank the rest of the team for doing such a great job, especially Mike Fourie who has been driving the entire project in style!

TFS Build: Dependency Replication using Community TFS Build Extensions

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 23:51:33 +0000

I have posted before on how to implement dependency replication using TFS Build, once for TFS 2008 using MSBuild and then for TFS 2010 using Windows Workflow. The last post was not complete (I could not post all implementation details back then for various reasons), so I decided that I should post a new solution for this, but this time using the Community TFS Build Extensions library.

If it is a good idea to store your dependencies in source control or not is a question that is well debated. I’m not going to argue pros and cons here, but for those of you that want to go this way here is a build process template that will get you started.

Community TFS Build Manager available for Visual Studio 2012 RC

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 22:44:07 +0000

I finally got around to push out a version of the Community TFS Build Manager that is compatible with Visual Studio 2012 RC. Unfortunately I had to do this as a separate extension,
it references different versions of the TFS assemblies and also some properties and methods that the 2010 version uses are now obsolete in the TFS 2012 API.

To download it, just open the Extension Manager, select Online and search for TFS Build:

Deploying SSDT Projects with TFS Build

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:29:05 +0000

As many of you probably have noticed by now, Visual Studio Database Projects are not supported in the next version of Visual Studio (currently named
Visual Studio 11 Beta). When you open a solution containing a VSDB project, VS11 wants to convert it to a SQL Server Developer Tools project instead.

This project type ships with SQL Server and has a feature set that covers most of the functionality of the VSDB project, plus some new features, such
a support for SQL 2012 and SQL Azure. A feature comparison list between the two project types can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ssdt/archive/2011/11/21/sql-server-data-tools-ctp4-vs-vs2010-database-projects.aspx

Awarded Visual Studio ALM MVP for 2012!

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:42:08 +0000

Today I received an email from Microsoft stating that:

Dear Jakob Ehn,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award!
This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.
We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Studio ALM technical communities during the past year.

This is incredibles news and I really want to thank both the people at Microsoft who nominated me and some of the (now) fellow MVP’s that I have worked with over the last year, both as part of the Visual Studio ALM Rangers program and as part of the TFS Build Extensions community project, in particular Mike Fourie and of course my colleague and main source of inspiration Terje Sandström 🙂

Adding Fake Build Information in TFS 2010

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:41:48 +0000

We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it back to the build log.

Managing Build Templates with Community TFS Build Manager

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:02:04 +0000

A year ago I blogged about how to manage your build process templates using the TFS API. The main reason for doing this is that you can (and should!) store your “golden” build process templates in a common location in your TFS project collection, and then add them to each team project that requires those templates. This way, you can fix a bug or add a new feature in one place and have the change affect all build definitions.

Handling Warnings and Errors with InvokeProcess in TFS 2010 Build

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:55:18 +0000

The InvokeProcess activity is very useful when it comes to running shell commands and external command line tools during a build process. When it comes to integrating with TFS source control during a build, the TF.exe command line tool can be your friend, as it lets you do most of the usual stuff such as check-in, checkout, add, modify workspaces etc.

However, it can be a bit tricky to handle the output from tf.exe, since it often produces warnings that is not necessarily a problem for your build. This is not a problem related only to tf.exe, but to all applications that produces errors and warnings on the canonical error format.

TFS 2010 Deep Dive classes in Stockholm

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:44:20 +0000

I’ll be running a Team Foundation Server 2010 Deep Dive class twice this spring in Stockholm at our friends at Cornerstone.

The class is 4 days and we will be “diving deep” into all aspects of TFS 2010, including:

Deployment
Administration
Source Control
Check-in Policies
Branching strategies
Work Items
Office integration
Reporting
Customization
Team Build
Working with build definitions
Developing Custom Activities
Automatic deployment
Test Management
Microsoft Test Manager
Creating and running manual tests

Avoiding TF237124 when Creating Work Items in New Areas

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:42:41 +0000

At my company we write a lot of tools and extensions that uses the TFS API to automate various things for us. A very common thing to automate is the creation of work items and the areas and iterations structure.

Creating a work item using the TFS API is simple, just connect to TFS, get the WorkItemStore service object and create a new work item and set any fields that you want to:

Creating a work item

Introducing: Community TFS Build Manager

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:36:06 +0000

The latest release of the Community TFS Build Extensions include a brand new tool called Community TFS Build Manager and has been created for two reasons:

An implementation of the Team Foundation Build API which is referenced by the Rangers Build Customization Guidance V2 (available H1 2012) \
Provide a solution to a real problem. The Community TFS Build Manager is intended to ease the management of builds in medium to large Team Foundation Server environments, though it does provide a few features which all users may find useful.

The first version of the tool has been implemented by myself and Mike Fourie. You can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery here:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/16bafc63-0f20-4cc3-8b67-4e25d150102c

December 2011 TFS Power Tools Release

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:07:56 +0000

Brian Harry just posted an update on the latest version of the TFS 2010 Power Tools. This will most likely by the last version of the Power Tools for the TFS 2010 version, next version will target Dev11!

The main improvements in this release are:

Team Foundation Server Power Tools for Eclipse
MSSCCI Provider for 64-bit IDE’s
VS 2010 Power Tools update
Improved Work item Search
Best Practice Analyzer now also analyzes the integration with Project Server, if you are using it

Compatibility Problem with Microsoft Test Manager 2010 and Visual Studio 2011

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:38:00 +0000

*UPDATE 10.01.2012: *

The issue has been resolved by Microsoft and will be addressed in patch soon. Here is the full description from the Connect site: \

“We’ve identified the rootcause. This bug was introduced in the compatibility GDR patch released for VS 2010 to work against 2011 TFS Server. We shall be releasing a patch soon. Till then, please follow the workaround mentioned to unblock yourselves. “

When setting up a physical environment for a new test controller on our TFS 2010 server, I ran into a problem that seems to be related to having installed the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 TFS Compatibility GDR and/or Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview

TFS 2010 Build - Troubleshooting the TF215097 error

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:51:48 +0000

Anyone working with developing custom activities in TFS 2010 Build has run into the following dreadful error message when running the build:

TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition TeamProjectMyBuildDefinition: Cannot create unknown type ‘{clr-namespace:[namespace];assembly=[assembly]}Activity

What the error means is that when the TFS build service loads the build process template XAML for the build definition, it can’t create an instance of the customer workflow activity that is referenced from it.

First stable release of the Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 22:50:15 +0000

Today the first stable release of the Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions shipped on the CodePlex site. Visual Studio ALM MVP Mike Fourie (aka Mr MSBuild Extension Pack) has been the leader of this project and has done a tremendous job, both in contributing functionality as well as coordinating the work for the first release. Great work Mike! I (as well as several others) have contributed a small part of the activities, I plan to be working on the upcoming releases as well.

Automatically Merging Work Items in TFS 2013

Tue, 17 May 2011 20:43:31 +0000

** Source available at http://mergeworkitems.codeplex.com/ **

Half a year ago I wrote about about Merging Work Items with a custom check-in policy. The policy evaluated the pending changes and for all pending merges, it traversed the merge history to find the associated work items and let the user add them to the current changeset.

I promised to post the source to the check-in policy (and I’ve got a lot of requests for it), but I never did. This was primary for two reasons:

TFS 2010 Inmeta Build Explorer

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:38:07 +0000

This weekend we at Inmeta release a free Visual Studio 2010 Team Explorer extensions that solves the problem with the Builds node in the Team Explorer not being hierarchic. For some reason, this part of the Team Explorer didn’t get the nice hierarchical folder structure that the Work items node got in 2010. The result is that, for a company that has several hundreds of builds in the same team project, it becomes very hard to navigate.

Integrating Code Metrics in TFS 2010 Build

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:39:50 +0000

The build process template and custom activity described in this post is available here:
http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/Inmeta%20TFS%20Build%20Sample.zip

Running code metrics has been available since VS 2008, but only from inside the IDE. Yesterday Microsoft finally released Visual Studio Code Metrics Power Tool 10.0, a command line tool that lets you run code metrics on your applications. This means that it is now possible to perform code metrics analysis on the build server as part of your nightly/QA builds. In this post I will show how you can run the metrics command line tool from a build, and also a custom activity that reads the output and appends the results to the build log, and fails the build if the metric values exceeds certain (configurable) treshold values.

TFS 2010 Build Custom Activity for Merging Assemblies

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:59:29 +0000

*** The sample build process template discussed in this post is available for download from here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/ILMerge.xaml ***

In my previous post I talked about library builds that we use to build and replicate dependencies between applications in TFS. This is typically used for common libraries and tools that several other application need to reference.

When the libraries grow in size over time, so does the number of assemblies. So all solutions that uses the common library must reference all the necessary assemblies that they need, and if we for example do a refactoring and extract some
code into a new assembly, all the clients must update their references to reflect these changes, otherwise it won’t compile.

Dependency Replication with TFS 2010 Build

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:02:09 +0000

Some time ago, I wrote a post about how to implement dependency replication using TFS 2008 Build. We use this for Library builds, where we set up a build definition for a common library, and have the build check the resulting assemblies back into source control. The folder is then branched to the applications that need to reference the common library. See the above post for more details.

Of course, we have reimplemented this feature in TFS 2010 Build, which results in a much nicer experience for the developer who wants to setup a new library build. Here is how it looks:
There is a separate build process template for library builds registered in all team projects \

Performing Checkins in TFS 2010 Build

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:20:53 +0000

Update 15.03.2014 - Fixed broken link to download

*** The custom activity is availabe for download here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=EE034C9F620CD58D%21168 ***

Often when creating different types of release builds (e.g. where you build something that should be installed or consumed by other applications) there is a need to check in the results of the build back
to source control. A common build type for us at Inmeta is Library Builds, which we use for common libraries that are shared among several applications. We have created a special build process template
for this scenario that handles versioning, copying of the resulting binaries to a pre-defined folder, optionally merges the assemblies using ILMerge, and finally checking that binaries back to TFS as part of the build.

Developing and debugging Server Side Event Handlers in TFS 2010

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:48:11 +0000

Update 2012-01-23: Added note about .NET framework

Martin Hinshelwood wrote an excellent post recently http://nakedalm.com/team-foundation-server-2010-event-handling-with-subscribers/ ) about a new type of integration
available in TFS 2010, namely server side event handlers, that is executed within the TFS context. I wasn’t aware of this new feature and as Martin notes, there doesn’t seem to be any material/documentation of it at all.
Previously, when you wanted some custom action to be executed when some event occurs in TFS (check-in, build completed…) you wrote a web/WCF service with a predefined signature and subscribed to the event using bissubscribe.exe.
Usually you want to get more information from TFS than what is available in the event itself so you would have to use the TFS client object model to make new requests back to TFS to get that information.
The deployment of these web services is always a bit of a hassle, especially around security. Also there is no way to affect the event itself, e.g. to stop the event from finishing depending on some condition. This can be done using
server side events.

Merging Work Items in TFS 2010

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:10:13 +0000

In TFS 2010, branching and merging have been greatly improved with support for branch visualization and tracking of changesets and work items across branches. A simple example of this looks like this: \

Here we track Work Item nr 3 which was originally resovled in the Test branch (with changeset 35). We can also see that the work item has been merged into the Production branch (as changeset 37), back to Main (62) and finally to FeatureC (140).
If we switch to the Timeline view, we get a nice view of the order of these merges, together with the dates.

Why can’t I see test results in the TFS 2010 Build Report?

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:11:47 +0000

In TFS 2010, I have been asked this question several times: I have a build setup with tests and (possibly) code coverage, but in the build summary report it only shows No Test Results and No Code Coverage Results

What’s more interesting is that when I log in and view the build, I can see the test results!

This does of course imply that it is a one of those annoying security issues, and of course it is.
To be able to see test results you must have the View Test Runs permission, which can be assigned/revoked at the security group level per team project:

TFS 2010 DeepDive i Stockholm i oktober

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:08:55 +0000

Note: Swedish post

Efter att ha kört många seminarier, workshops och deep dive kurser på Visual Studio och TFS 2010 i Norge är det nu äntligen dags för oss att köra kurs i Sverige!

Första tillfället blir nu i oktober på Cornerstone 18-21 Oktober. Saxat från kursbeskrivningen:

T359 - Effektiv systemutveckling med Visual Studio och Team Foundation Server 2010

I denna utbildning lär vi dig hur du och din organisation kan effektivisera systemutvecklingsprocessen med hjälp av Visual Studio och Team Foundation Server. Målgruppen för denna kurs är främst utvecklare och arkitekter men den är lämplig även för testare och den som ansvarar för metoder och processer.

TFS Team Build 2010: How to place the build output to a fixed location

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:47:11 +0000

By default, TFS Team Build creates a new folder in the drop location for every build. I have seen request from people that wonder how to always have team build put the output in the same folder every time, effectively overwriting the results from the last build. This is easy to accomplish by adding an activity that copies the drop folder to a fixed location.

To copy the result of the build to a fixed location, you need to modify the build process template:

TFS 2010 Build: Dealing with the API restriction error

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 06:08:40 +0000

Recently I’ve come across this error a couple of times when running builds that exeucte unit tests using Test containers:

API restriction: The assembly ‘file:///C:Buildsmyassembly.dll’ has already loaded from a different location. It cannot be loaded from a new location within the same appdomain.

Every time I’ve got this error, the project has been a web application, and the path to the assembly points down to the _PublishedWebsites directory that is created beneath the Binaries folder during a team build.

Building Visual Studio Setup Projects with TFS 2010 Team Build

Fri, 14 May 2010 08:38:28 +0000

UPDATE: 2010-09-15 – Added details about the use of the ExitCode variable

One of the most common complaints from people starting to use Team Build is that is doesn’t support building Microsoft’s own Setup and Deployment project (*.vdproj). When creating a default build definition that compiles a solution containing a setup project, you’ll get the following warning:

The project file “MyProject.vdproj” is not supported by MSBuild and cannot be built.

Speed up loading of test results from builds in Visual Studio

Sun, 09 May 2010 23:04:09 +0000

I still see people complaining about the long time it takes to load test results from a TFS build in Visual Studio. And they make a valid point, it does take a very long time to load the test results, even for a small number of tests. The reason for this is that the test results is not just the result of the test run but also all the binaries that were part of the test run. This often also means that the debug symbols (*.pdb) will be downloaded to your local machine. This reason for this behaviour is that it letsyou re-run the tests locally.

Executing legacy MSBuild scripts in TFS 2010 Build

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:04:13 +0000

When upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010, all builds are “upgraded” in the sense that a build definition with the same name is created, and it uses the UpgradeTemplate build process template to execute the build. This template basically just runs MSBuild on the existing TFSBuild.proj file. The build definition contains a property called ConfigurationFolderPath that points to the TFSBuild.proj file.

So, existing builds will run just fine after upgrade. But what if you want to use the new workflow functionality in TFS 2010 Build, but still have a lot of MSBuild scripts that maybe call custom MSBuild tasks that you don’t have the time to rewrite? Then one option is to keep these MSBuild scrips and call them from a TFS 2010 Build workflow. This can be done using the MSBuild workflow activity that is avaiable in the toolbox in the Team Foundation Build Activities section:

Modify Build Failure Work Item in TFS 2010 Build

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:15:25 +0000

The default behaviour in TFS Team Build (all versions) is to create a bug work item when a build fails. This main benefit of this is that you get a work item for something that needs to be done, namely to fix the build!. When the developer responsible for the build failure has fixed the problem, he/she can associated that check-in with the work item that was created from the previous build failure.

Creating a Build Definition using the TFS 2010 API

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:09:00 +0000

*** UPDATE 2010-08-17 ** Several people have asked me for a complete sample application, so I have put this together and it is available here:
http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/CreateTFSBuildDefinition.zip

In this post I will show how to create a new build definition in TFS 2010 using the TFS API. When creating a build definition manually, using Team Explorer, the necessary steps are lined
out in the New Build Definition Wizard:

So, lets see how the code looks like, using the same order. To start off, we need to connect to TFS and get a reference to the IBuildServer object:

Getting TF215097 error after modifying a build process template in TFS Team Build 2010

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:52:47 +0000

When embracing Team Build 2010, you typically want to define several different build process templates for different scenarios. Common examples here are CI builds, QA builds and release builds. For example, in a contiuous build you often have no interest in publishing to the symbol store, you might or might not want to associate changesets and work items etc. The build server is often heavily occupied as it is, so you don’t want to have it doing more that necessary. Try to define a set of build process templates that are used across your company. In previous versions of TFS Team Build, there was no easy way to do this. But in TFS 2010 it is very easy so there is no excuse to not do it! :-)

Implementing Release Notes in TFS Team Build 2010

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:50:49 +0000

In TFS Team Build (all versions), each build is associated with changesets and work items. To determine which changesets that should be associated with the current build, Team Build finds the label of the “Last Good Build” an then aggregates all changesets up unitl the label for the current build. Basically this means that if your build is failing, every changeset that is checked in will be accumulated in this list until the build is successful.

Reember to uninstall all Beta 2 stuff before upgrading to VS 2010 RC

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:52:05 +0000

Yesterday I upgraded my dev laptop to VS 2010 RC. To upgrade to VS 2010 RC you need to first uninstall VS 2010 Beta 2 (which doesn’t really make it an upgrade does it? :-)

I also hade an instance of TFS 2010 Beta 2 om my machine so I uninstalled that as well. The installation of VS 2010 went fine, and then I installed Team Explorer 2010 RC. However, when starting VS and switching to the team explorer, I got the following error:

TFS 2010 Beta 2 – Upgrading Builds from TFS 2008

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:23:13 +0000

We are in the process of upgrading the entire company to TFS 2010 Beta 2, and in preparing for that we have done some test upgrades to make sure that all things work as expected after the upgrade. As expected, most issues that turned up had to do with builds. This is one of the areas that has changed the most compared to TFS 2008. I thought that I would use this post to run through some of the issues that we found.

TFS Team Build 2010: Working with Custom Code Activities

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:38:24 +0000

Disclaimer: This blog post discusses features in the TFS 2010 Beta 1 release. Some of these features might be changed in the RTM release.

In TFS 2010, Microsoft has changed the build orchestration language in Team Build from MSBuild to Windows Workflow 4.0. Aaron Hallberg has written a post on how to implement a custom workflow activity using either the workflow designer or using a code activity that composes an activity. In this post, I will show how to implement a “pure” code activity, i.e. no workflow elements,and how to add this activity to a build process definition. Note, this is still Beta 1, and some things will definitely change when Beta2 and RTM arrives but this will get you started with customizing your builds in TFS 2010.

VSTS 2010: Enabling Test Impact Analysis

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:08:20 +0000

A really cool new feature in VSTS 2010 is Test Impact Analysis which let developers view what tests that are affected by the current code changes. Pieter Gheysens wrote a blog post on how to set this up in the CTP, but things have changed a bit in Beta 1 so I thought that I would show how it is done. Since it still is a bit unintuitive to enable it, it might change once again in the RTM. The reason that it is a bit unintuitive to set it up, is because you need to have the following things:

TFS Team Build 2010: Executing Unit Tests

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:27:43 +0000

There are some changes and improvements in the area of executing unit tests in Team Build 2010. Mostly the changes make it easier to define which unit tests you want to execute as part of the build. In this post I will go through the different options that you have when it comes to running unit tests and enabling code coverage.

To configure test settings for a Team Build, you select Edit Build Definition in Team Explorer, and then go to the Build Process tab. In the Build process parameters box there is a section for the testing parameters. To change the parameters, just edit them and hit the save button. There is no need to check anything in or out to change the parameters. Only changes to the build process require you to check in the build process file (.xaml)

Working with Build Definitions in TFS Team Build 2010

Wed, 27 May 2009 22:17:35 +0000

*Disclaimer: This blog post discusses features in the TFS 2010 Beta 1 release. Some of these features might be changed in the RTM release. *
In my last post I talked about the new major features of Team Build in TFS 2010. This time, I will go into more detail on how you work with build definitions. In TFS 2010, the whole build process is now implemented on top of Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 (WF4). This means that everything that has to do with creating and customizing builds in TFS 2010 is now done using a workflow designer UI. This means that you no longer have to remember all the different MSBuild targets when you want to insert some custom logic in your build. On the other hand, you obviously need to understand how a default team build process is implemented, which activities does what, what WF properties and variables that exist. And eventually you might also have to learn how to implement custom workflow activites when you need more functionality than what is included in the standard team build activities.

TFS Team Build 2010: What’s New?

Sat, 23 May 2009 23:10:22 +0000

VSTS 2010 Beta 1 is finally available. Beta 1 is a huge release a contains tons of new functionality in almost all areas of Team System. We at Osiris Data have been using Team System since the first beta, and we also help our customers how to adopt TFS in their organization. So for us VSTS 2010 is a very exciting release.

I am planning to post several blog entries about the new functionality of VSTS 2010, in particular I will focus on Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Build. I have been working a lot with Team Build 2005 and 2008 and have been looking forward to the 2010 release. VSTS 2008 was a minor release for TFS, so a lot of missing features and change requests haven’t been implemented until now.

Free Seminar on Visual Studio Team System 2010 in Oslo, Norway

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:14:12 +0000

On May 20th Terje and Mikael from my company (Osiris Data) will hold a seminar in Oslo, Norway where they will run through all (?) the new cool features in VSTS 2010. Expect to see demos on the new functionality for manual and UI testing, branch visualization, hierarchical work items, gated check-ins and lots of other stuff.

VSTS 2010 is a really huge release and if the rumours are true, the Beta 1 will be released in May, hopefully before the seminar :-)

How To: Automatically Enable Checkin Policies for new TFS Team Projects

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:12:46 +0000

When creating new team projects in TFS, the project is created from a project template, that basically is a set of XML files. Here you can define all your work item types, queries, reports, portal site and some other things. One of the things that you can’t specify here, is what checkin policies that you want to enable for that team project. At our company, we usually create a new team project for every customer so for every new customer we need to manually modify the checkin policies for that project to match our company policy.

Implementing Dependency Replication with TFS Team Build

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:36:36 +0000

A very common question from people is how to handle dependencies between projects/applications/team projects in TFS source control. A typical scenario is that you a common library/framework tucked away nicely somewhere in TFS source control, and now you have some applications that, in some way, needs to reference this project.

My colleague Terje has written an article on what he calls “Subsystem branching”, in which he talks about different ways to organize your source code in order to solve the above problem. Ther article can be found here:
http://geekswithblogs.net/terje/archive/2008/11/02/article-on-subsystem-branching.aspx

Writing a Code Coverage Checkin Policy

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:58:40 +0000

The source code for this policy is available here : http://www.codeplex.com/TFSCCCheckinPolicy
Checkin policies is a great tool in TFS for keeping your code base clean and adhering to your companhy standards and policies. The checkin policies that are included are very useful, but don’t stop there! Implementing your own custom checkin policy is pretty straight-forward and can soon pay off by stopping people from doing silly things (on purpose or not…).