TFS

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

*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 ...

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. ...

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. ...

** 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: ...

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. ...