Road to ALM

Author: Rene van Osnabrugge

  • Using Config Transformation for easier (Azure) Development

    Visual Studio 2010 has this nice feature for config transformations. When adding a new build configuration you also get the possibility to add a web.[Configuration].config file which contains specific settings for that specific configuration. When using the publish function, the transformation uses pretty slick XSLT transformations to update the web.config…

  • Distributing Work Items Queries to others via mail

    When working with work items, sometimes it is useful to send the results of a work item query to other people. Even people from outside of your development team. For example the customer wants to know the status of his bugs and does not have access to your systems. In…

  • Removing speaker notes from PowerPoint

    It is not really ALM related but man…I am so glad I know this feature that I really want to share it here. When I speak at seminars or conferences, people always ask you for the slides. I always have a lot of notes in my slides that I don’t…

  • My DevDays 2011 Session–Adopting Scrum

    In April 2011 I co presented the Pre-Conference for the Dutch DevDays. This Pre-Conference was all about adopting Agile Practices. My part was to tell something about adopting Scrum. I already mentioned this in my previous post Below you find the abstract and the link to the Channel 9 Video…

  • Twitter Summary of the Future of Visual Studio ALM @ TechEd US

    Yesterday I was looking the video of TechEd US. The Future of Microsoft Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management. This session of Cameron Skinner gives a really nice overview of the new features that are coming up in Visual Studio vNext. During the session I twittered some things that eventually give…

  • Managing your sprint backlog easier with Excel

    In my previous post I talked about the Excel workbooks in combination with the MS Scrum template. Excel is a great help in quickly organizing and editing your work items. It is however kind of hard to see a good status overview of your work in the current sprint. Main…

  • DevDays 2011 Session, Tfs Reports

    In my previous post I mentioned my session on the Dutch Event DevDays. The session was recorded and is posted on Channel 9. Unfortunately for the english readers, the session is in Dutch. You can find the video here on Channel 9 You can find the slides in my previous…

  • Use the MSF Agile workbooks in the MS Scrum template

    The MSF Agile 5.0 Process Template in Team Foundation Server 2010 comes with a great set of Excel workbooks. These workbooks allow you maintain your Product and Iteration Backlog with Excel. The workbooks contain a set of macros that are very useful, because they transform information from the workbook in…

  • Microsoft DevDays 2011–Garbage In–Garbage Out. Inzicht in TFS Reports

    On the 29th of April I presented on the DevDays 2011 Conference. I talked about TFS reporting and what you need to do to properly fill the reports. Also I showed how to access the warehouse with tools like Excel and Report Builder and what you can do to enter…

  • Microsoft DevDays 2011–Adopting Scrum

    On the 27th of April I presented on the DevDays 2011 ALM Pre conference. I talked about Adopting Scrum. I started the presentation with the basics of Scrum, showed how to “sell” Scrum in your organization. After that, I showed how to use Visual Studio Team Foundation Server as the…

  • The road to the DevDays 2011

    DevDays. It is the biggest Developer event in the Netherlands. I cannot remember exactly when I visited the DevDays for the first time, but that is getting bigger every year is pretty obvious. The biggest difference with other events in the Netherlands is the great variety of speakers and the…

  • Connect older Visual Studio to TFS 2010 (VS 2005 & VS 2008)

    It is certainly possible to connect older Visual Studio clients to TFS 2010. Most of the functionality just works. In order to make it work you need a compatibility update. The updates can be found here: VS2008 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d&displaylang=en VS2005 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689&displaylang=en Beware !: SP1 (both VS2008 and VS2005) is needed for…

  • The Team Tab has disappeared from the Ribbon in Excel (or error TF80012)

    Sometimes it happens that because of a crash or unknown issue the Team Tab in Excel disappears. Usually you will notice this, because you get an error when you try to open a excel sheet with TFS data. The reason is that this Add-In is disabled. To make it appear…

  • Unit Test Deployment files not found in VS2010

    When writing Unit tests, it is sometimes useful to use specific files for a specific Unit test. With help of the TestContext object in a Unit test class you can easily deploy files along with your Unit Tests. Everytime a Unit test is executed, the file(s) is published to an…

  • TFS 2010 Web Access Client shows Error 500 (Request was rejected by http filter)

    We recently published our TFS Web Access Client via HTTPS to the outside world. Everything was working fine until we pressed the “Edit Query” button. A Internal Server Error (500) appeared with the extra info “Request was rejected by http filter). We are using Microsoft TMG server to publish the…

  • Change Environment settings in VS 2010

    If you first start up VS 2010 you have to choose your environment settings. Once chosen, you will never get this screen back. Sometimes you choose the “wrong” one and you cannot find your stuff anymore. How to reset this. After searching in Options etc. I could not find it.…

  • (De) Attach Team Project Collections

    In TFS 2010 Team Project Collections are introduced. This is great because it allows you to maintain your Team Projects in a better way. With TFS 2008 you had to build a complete new server for it. For an overview of Team Project Collections read this article by Brian Harry.…

  • Presentation dotNed meeting 23-6-2010

    On June 23 june, I gave a presentation for the dotNed gebruikersgroep in the Netherlands. The presentation was about “Selecting an Optimal Branching and Merging strategy”. The slides can be downloaded here.

  • Finally my own blog

    This blog will start shortly n providing information about ALM, ALM Tools and above all Microsoft Team Foundation Server