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. ...

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: ...

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) ...

*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. ...

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. ...

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 :-) ...

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. ...

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 ...

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…). ...