TFS

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! ...

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! 🙂 ...

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. ...

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! ...

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. ...

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: ...

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 ...

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 🙂 ...

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. ...

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. ...