Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft’s new version of Visual Studio Release Management is currently in public preview in VSTS. It is currently targeted for the TFS 2015 Update 2 version that should be shipped later this spring. However, even if you are not all in on Visual Studio Team Services, you can still use this service! Since the build/release agents that are used can run on premise without any necessary firewall ports being opened inbound, you have full access to any internal TFS servers and application servers that you want to deploy to. ...

This year at the second MVP summit I presented a new solution for hosting a private extension gallery. Since then I have finished up the code and put it up on the CodePlex site so you can use it as you want to. In this blog post I will walk through the background and how you deploy and use the solution. Note: The sourcecode is available at http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com/ as a new 2.0 release. I have branched the original source code so that it is still available. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Updated January 13th 2013: Added note about ASP.NET MVC 4.0 prerequirement Note: The installer and the complete source code is available over at CodePlex at the following location: http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com Extensions and addins are everywhere in the Visual Studio ALM ecosystem! Microsoft releases new cool features in the form of extensions and the list of 3rd party extensions that plug into Visual Studio just keeps growing. One of the nice things about the VSIX extensions is how they are deployed. Microsoft hosts a public Visual Studio Gallery where you can upload extensions and make them available to the rest of the community. Visual Studio checks for updates to the installed extensions when you start Visual Studio, and installing/updating the extensions is fast since it is only a matter of extracting the files within the VSIX package to the local extension folder. ...

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. ...

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 ...