The Team Foundation Power Tool has just been released.

It includes major news since the last release.

Major features highlights:

• Explorer Extension - That's right you will now be able to do operations on TFS source controlled files directly from windows explorer!!!!
• The concept of Teams (team tools) - The concepts have teams have been introduced. You can see teams inside team explorer (it even has IM integration). It also allows you to have team queries (work items for the team (or sub teams) instead of just my work teams)
• Power Shell Extensions - If you are a scripting  buff youwill love this
• TFS Server Manager - Watch statistics and data about TFS usage (this is the tool Brian Harry uses to give us the TFS dogfood statistics on his blog)

The installer as also been greatly improved (for example the setup is now per machine instead of per user), tfpt.exe had some additions and the help file has been improved.

The Team Tools has a GREAT feature. It allows you to automatically get updates for custom contents (custom controls, check in policies,..) this will greatly reduce the hassle of manually distributing custom controls and check in policies.

Go grab it. I still haven't tried the final version but i have been using a pre release version for a few weeks and it's great (love the team tools).

Kudos for Team System Team to deliver value added tools between the major releases.

It is available for download here 

[Cross Posted on http://agilior.pt/blogs/tiago.pascoal/archive/2008/11/08/5898.aspx]

This is the question I hear a lot.

People install a TFS trial and when they license it with a volume license agreement but they can't find their serial number to upgrade from trial to licensed version.

After failing to find the key, they do the sensible thing. Call Support. :-) Which normally doesn't help.

Here is the recipe to quick found your key.

Download the TFS ISO file from the volume licensing site.

Either burn the image or use an ISO reader to see it's contents.

There should be a folder called AT which contains a file called setup.sdb

Open setup.sdb with a text editor (notepad will do fine) and search for the string Product Key

The next line contains the product key.

Voilá. You are now read to fire up TFS setup (control panel->add/remove programs) and enter your serial key.

On the 10th of March Lenny Fenster released a new version of the Project Server 2007 VSTS Connector.

This releases fixes some bugs and adds support for TFS 2008, unfortunately Lenny forgot (most probably lacked the time to do it) to update the requirements list. We had some issues while upgrading the older version of the connector on a installation still using TFS 2005.

The components install without problems except the connector for Team Foundation server (the third option on the installer). The installer aborts stating it had unexpected error. The log file hasn't any useful information.

After some heavy digging (and nagging Lenny over IM :-)) I figured out that the problem lied  on the fact that the connector installer references to TFS 2008 API instead of TFS 2005

To solve the installation problem you have two choices:

• Install the TFS 2008 API on the server the connector is going to run. The only way to install the API is by installing Team Explorer 2008
• After the first time the installation fails, create a standard .Net policy redirection DLL file configuration file on the installation folder temporary directory (c:\windows\PS2007-TFS Connector) so when the code attempts to to access TFS using the API it uses 2005 API instead of the 2008 version. I haven't gone this path, since this would also involve applying the same redirection on the connector. So in theory this should work but I haven't tested it. :-)

The web site to manage the connector is also configured to use framework 3.5 so you must install framework 3.5 on that machine (if the web site is installed in the same machine as the TFS connector then no need to worry about this since Team Explorer 2008 also installs framework 3.5).

Lost a bunch of hair on this one, I hope this saves you same time if you are in a similar situation.

Just got a mail from Martin Woodward that TeamPrise 3.0 has been released. TeamPrise is an amazing piece of technology that allows you to use Team Foundation Server in a cross platform perspective.

If you have cross platform development environment with developers working on different systems like Linux or Mac OS X there are no excuses not to use Team Foundation Server. TeamPrise is the solution that allows you to access Team Foundation Server from any environment that runs java or the Eclipse IDE.

If you are curious on what is new, you can read the changelog for version 3.0.

If you had attended my session last week on Techdays you could have watched my demoing TeamPrise (still v2.0) running in an Linux Machine. :-)

I have been informed that due to my recent misdeeds I will have to step in and do another session on Techdays.

Although I don't know if this is going to be a punishment for me or if it is my co-presenter Miguel Madeira that is going to be pay the penalty for having me on stage with him. :-)

This is session VST09 and we are going to talk about Team Build, and how you can use it to automate your build present and how you can use on you your agile development process by leveraging the continuous integration capabilities.

Don't worry, if you are yet not aware of what is continuous integration at the end of the session you will. We will explain what is continuous integration, what are the advantages and where does continuous integration fits in Team Build within the build process and the unit testing.

We will also explain how you can leverage the build process to help you in other areas of your development process but we don't want to spoil all the surprises, see you in the session. :-)

[Cross Posted on http://www.agilior.pt/blogs/tiago.pascoal/archive/2008/03/02/3799.aspx]

Some posts I liked to read this week

Better Software - Faster - Mike Coon talks about his thoughts for improving the process of development of software done in house. I think this is an important point, people and tool developers tend to place shrink wrap software development and in house development at the same level. As if they were exactly the same. Having done both i must say there are very significant difference and unfortunately most SDLC tools are product development biased.

Developers are not hot-swappable - Old arguments for something that should be carved in stone years ago. Yet projects still fail because this idea is not yet engrained in project manager mind. *sigh*

Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it - Jeff Patton talks about the difference between iteration and increment in Agile Development. Post based on a presentation called Embrace Uncertanty he has done. (the presentation is downloadable. Worth seeing. The post really doesn't do justice to the presentation, I wish we had the video of the presentation)

Software Development in the Mines of Moria - A reminder there is a _lot_ of code out there that isn't written using the latest technologies.....

Prototypes and Real Applications - On prototypes using scripting languages and why we throw them away. Should we they be thrown out?

[Crossposted on http://www.agilior.pt/blogs/tiago.pascoal/archive/2008/02/02/3606.aspx]

Some posts I liked to read this week

Plenty of links this week.

On Interpretation of Results and Quotation out of Context Title says it all. :-)

Database War Stories #3: Flickr - How is Flickr databases architected to handle it's huge data requirements. I was expecting more juice. No gory details or juicy information, but interesting nonetheless.

Why Distributed Version Control Matters to You, Today - A explanation why decentralized source control matters and why you should use it. Heavily biased to open source development, since they probably represent the archetypal of decentralized/dispersed developer teams. Interesting read.

When computer programmers dabble in economics: Paying parking tickets - Brilliant a programmer doing cost benefit analysis and risk assessment. Wish this was taught in computer science curricula. :-)

Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College) - A rant that is making the rounds on the web. How colleges are killing computer science. I won't comment on this, because I'm tired of hearing people calling me a negativist. :-)

Software Engineering and the Cause of the CS Enrollment Crisis  - Mark Guzdial talks about it the dropping numbers of people enrolling in Computer science courses. Is this related to the previous link? Is this the cause of the reasons exposed in the previous link? or the dumbing down of curricula mentioned on the on the previous link are just a consequence of the dropping numbers and a futile and useless attempt to solve this enrollment crisis?

Two Thoughts on Computer Science Courses - This seems to be CS and Education week. Small post, but interesting. And has plenty of interesting links. And I'm always a sucker for a soundbyte :

My first thought: if your comp-sci course is easy then you’re either a genius or you’re wasting your money. The odds on that are not in your favour.

My second thought: if your comp-sci course takes you to the edge of weird when it comes to computing (to put it another way: if you’re constantly thinking “when will I ever need to use this??”) then you’re probably really quite fortunate. Drink it in

40 Reasons Why Software Projects Die - Title says it all.

Rich Programmer Food - The title is a bit misleading, but it's GREAT post about compiler writing is a fundamental course in a Computer science degree. I have rephrased in a more gentler way. Steve Yegge summons it as:

If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work.

This brings me back memories of probably the most demanding course I took on college. Writing a compiler is hard, but it taught me a lot of things. Not in terms of programming but in terms of software engineering,data structuring and some neat compiler techniques. We wrote a compiler for a Pascal like language that targeted x86 machines. The code was written in C and it was cross platform and it runned in Unix and MSDOS.

• The absolute need of source control tool (three people working on a compiler concurrently totally show the need for source control. Off course back then we still didn't knew source control. We regulary had one person integrating everyone tree into a integration tree, and we had a make target that we runned regularly to zip all the sources. Which we diff'ed manually if was needed to backtrack some changes).
• Build Process - Having a build process that was repeatable. No need to have manual builds, anyone could start a build with a single command.
• The need for automated testing, back then we didn't knew unit testing nor there were any tools for it. So we had to settle for a lesser approach. A bunch of sources (that represented all the features of our language and edge cases. Can't recall exactly but we had more than 100 tests including a game of tic tac toe) that we compiled in a shell script, detected if the our compiler core dumped, we also runned the non interactive tests and compared the output with expected results (file comparison with the expected output. Not very sophisticated but it worked).
• Automation - The need for automation on repetitive processes. Our regression tests were made on a Unix Machine, but we had to produce MS DOS executables. So we had to take the generate assembly filed and assemble it on a MS DOS machine using MASM or TASM. This was a manual process. Run the regression tests, place all the ASM generated files on a floppy disk (which mean mount floppy,copy files and unmount the floppy), and assemble all of them on the MS DOS (we had a batch for that though :-)). After a while we got tired of this. So we automated it. The MSDOS machine was connected to the Unix machine through a serial cable. Via terminal software, we compiled the code via make, run the shell scripting for tests regression, zipped the results, downloaded them via Z-Modem protocol, and with a batch file unzip the file, assembled the results and run the non interactive ones to see if they crashed.  Ah the joy of automation, it sure beat the semi manual process . :-)

Things we should have learned in the process, but didn't.

• The importance of bug tracking - The importance of a bug tracking system. We relied on paper and memory to mantain a list of problems. We never knew when problems (and if) and been solved, what caused the problem. This meant mean some productivity hit, and lost time when old bugs reappeared and we didn't know that it was in fact an old bug (although this was attenuated with tests for regressions)

We also took some other lessons, but this is already longer than it should for a quickie kind of post. :-) All this to say that not only I resonate with Steve's post but I also agree with him. Too bad the year after I took this course it was the last time it was part of curricula. Apparently people complained it was too hard, and it was removed. *sigh* Too bad for them. Demanding? yes. Hard? Yes, totally worth it? ABSOLUTELY. The benefits and lessons far outweigh the costs.

Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers - What can I say? title says it all.

[Cross Posted on http://www.agilior.pt/blogs/tiago.pascoal/archive/2008/01/26/3577.aspx]

Last week we did a four days workshop on Visual Studio Team Systems. We have collected a number of resources with  some pointers to things that we either found useful, provide more formal answers to the questions that we have been asked or that give some pointers in solving some pains the client needeed to address.

I've decided to share this links with you, perhaps they can be of use to someone else too. :-)

General  

Team Foundation Server FAQ

VSTS Resources  - A huge list of VSTS Resources. Lots of information

VSTS Rocks -  Visual Studio Team Systems Community Site.

Installation/Configuration

Configuring Team Foundation Server to use an external Sharepoint - If you need to configure TFS to use an external sharepoint. This is not recommended for now, but if you if really have to, this is how to do it.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 - freshly released VS SP1. Includes Team Suite, Foundation Server and Express editions.

Integration

How to integrate with external systems. For me, the eventing system is the subsystems which i like the most.

Subscribing to TFS Events - How you can subscribe to events (includes the list of available events. The list is very useful, i don't understand i the table tbl_events doesn't contain the full list of events we can subscribe to.)

TFS Notification Web Services - Visual Studio 2005 Project Template - VS template project, that will give a head start in implementing the contracts for receiving TFS notifications. The templates implements all contracts for the out of the box TFS events. No need to muck with XML, these templates will nicely deserialize the event data into (almost) nice objects. (not a problem with the template, but with the XSD provided by TFS).

How to Retrieve all event subscriptions - Code to overcome the inability of bisubscribe to list all subscribed events. Personally i find it is much easier to just query the table tbl_Subscriptions on the integration database directly.

Team Foundation Server Event Subscriber - GUI for bisubscribe. Haven't tested. Don't know if it supports subscriptions listing.

Work Item Tracking RSS Feed - A sample to generate RSS feeds for Work Items.

Project Server Integration - TFS provides a (rather limited,eg no precessors support for now) integration with Project.  I hear a lot of requests for integration with Project Server. Personally we are proponents of more Agile methods, but if Project is your kind of thing, this seems like a solution. Although a not simple one, never tried, but i've skimmed the 184 pages of the whitepaper and it does seem like a big beast to tame. :-)

Web Forms for Submitting Issues to Team Foundation Server - A complain i hear often, is the lack of a web interface for the work item. If you don't want to resort to a full blown solution like TeamPlain, you can use this sample as a base for your web solution to work items.

Checkin Policies

Checkin Policies Overview - A post with an overview of checkin policies.

Jim Presto Blog - This blog has a trilogy of posts about creating your own checkin policies. It should give you a headstart. (no recent activity though)

checkin policy to disallow certain patterns - Sample of a custom checkin policy to disallow checkin of files whose name match a regexp.

Time that task -  Time that task, is a custom checkin policy, that will help you keep track of how much has already been spent on a give task.

Process Templates

Version 4.1 of MSF project Templates - An update for the MSF templates that are included in TFS out of the box.

Scrum for Team Systems - Free template provided by Conchango, that allows you to use scrum in TFS. We have been using it, since the betas with good results. Although we feel some extra reports would be nice. :-) Scrum guidance, has been written by Ken Schwaber of agile software development hall of fame. 

Customization

VSTS Customization toolkit - People who have already done some customizations to process template, now how labour intensive that is. Everything is done directly on the XML file. This this tool, simplifies this process A LOT. It totally rocks. Not only allows you to easily customize project templates, as will allow you to customize global lists (Glexport.exe/Glimport.exe), and work items (witimport.ext/witexport.exe) using the same easy process. This tool will allow prevent major hair loss (by pulling :-)).

VSTS Work Item Type Designer Preview - An experimental tool (current version doesn't save files yet), to allow you to customize work items definitions. A nice approach, instead of using a rich client to customize the definitions, it uses DSL tools to do it. I think in the future, this may provide a nice showcase for DSL tools.

How to use custom controls in Work Items - SP1 introduced a new feature, that allows you to use custom controls in work items (not only visual elements, but with business logic also). This projects aims to implement some useful custom controls so.

Managing work for Team System - Jeff Beehler gives us a nice description, of the kinds of work items that his team uses for Team Systems development (Orcas release)

[cross posted on http://www.agilior.pt/blogs/tiago.pascoal/default.aspx]