Latest Articles: TFS

Small companies cannot afford having an own specialized performance testing team, but knowing the basics can let us make some decent performance testing and ensure some minimum levels of quality.

This guide is quite useful a must read to get the concepts.

Looking for an Eclipse TFS free plugin, or for multiplaform Team Explorer / command line. Microsoft just bought Team Prise technology and now you can download this plugin for free.

Team Foundation Server for Managers... when your boss comes to your desk asking for adjusting work items... just ask him to install team explorer and show him the Excel Add-In, no more excuses :-).

Organizations always need a repeatable and reliable method to create a regularly available public build. In my previous organizations, I used in-house tools.—I even used a continuous integration build type. I just did not know at that time that it had a name!

What is continuous integration? Continuous integration is the process of generating a build whenever a programmer checks code into the source control server. When you use this process, it is a good idea to have a dedicated build server where you can synchronize and compile the sources, and run unit tests.

Software development life cycle processes evolved over time. Development teams realized the importance of having periodic builds. It started with a weekly build. Then it grew tighter when "nightlies" began, and tighter still with "hourlies." As the benefits of frequent builds became more obvious, organizations wanted more builds. And now we have continuous integration. But nightlies still exist. Many organizations still count on them to get a formal, reliable build.

Until now implementing Continuous Integration on .net involved installing a lot of great open source tools, sometimes a bit difficult to configure (Cruise Control, NAnt, NUnit, NCover...).

Now Visual Studio Team Suite + TFS offers an easy way to configure continuous integration in your project, in this guide you will find an overview about Team Foundation Build.

TFS is not something that you can install by clicking next next next..., you have to carefully plan and configure the installation, a lot of power, some complexity.

QUITE IMPORTANT: once you download this chm file, in some computers it won't display the pages properly (well, won't display them at all), you have to:

Performing backups in regular basis it's quite important, you never know when the server is going bananas, or your hard disk dies, or some smart ass break your source control / databases

This article explains you how to backup the data in a TFS, start with Source Control data and make a dummy test before having to face the real issue (it's not very pleasant to find that you didn't catch the concept of backup once you are going to restore a critical one ;-)).

So your TFS is working like heaven, some months ago you installed it in a local instance or stand alone server and everybody is happy using it, BUT...

Because of everybody wants to use it, your boss tells you to integrate it in the organization domain, or even worse a client wants to migrate all the repository to his company domain...

This guide will tell you how to perform this change, is not talking about hardware change it's more about domains, users, permissions...

Sometimes you start with a "test" TFS server machine and in one year you realize that the whole company is using that machine... your machine is just a toy for all the needs of the company :-)

This articles explains you how to migrate your TFS installation and databases from one machine to another, quite interesting

One of the common bottlenecks can be hard disk, in that case I would evalue moving the MDF and LDF DB files to a new hard disk (of course configuring it correctly in your SQL Server instance :-)), maybe that solves the problems and you don't need to make any dramatic change

When in VS2005 is working with Team Foundation Server, when you check out for edit it doesn't get the last version. It doesn't act like Source Safe. This thing could make some mistakes while merging and some code can disappear.

This Addin check when you check out for edit if you have the last version, and download it.

Another plugin that solves the Check Out without Get Latest Version (GLV).

If you have to stick to 2005 it's worth to give a try to this free plugin

99 % of the Ms developers use Visual Source Safe (VSS) for source code repository... when you move to Team Foundation Server (TFS), things seems to work the same but... you will find some differences that are not quite obvious

This doc will help you to tranfer your VSS knowledge into TFS / Team Explorer

One of the most annoying things that you find when moving from VSS to TFS is that making a checkout on a file does not automatically makes a getlatest version of that file in your local environment. Ms says that is because of good practices... I would say that's a pain in the neck !!! You are going to loose a lot of time merging and fixing files :-(.

Good news are: Ms has fixed this in 2008 version, but what about us poor souls that have to work with Visual Studio 2005 version ? We can use several free plugins that force that get latest just by clicking an option on the configuration settings !!