Category: Guidance
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Integrating TeamCity with Team Foundation Server – Part 2
In my previous post I introduced TeamCity as an alternative build server to use in conjunction with Team Foundation Server. This post mainly focused on getting started with TeamCity and building sources coming from Team Foundation Server. At the end of this previous post I talked about the dependency of…
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Integrating TeamCity with Team Foundation Server – Part 1
In this cross-platform world, where everything integrates with … well everything, it is not unusual to come across companies that use more than one system for their Application Lifecycle Management. Team Foundation Sever offers a great solution if it comes to ALM. Work Item Management, Build Management, Release Management etc.…
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Modern tools glossary
Maybe I am getting old, maybe I am too busy with other stuff but the number of frameworks, tools and utilities has seemed to grow exponentially over the last years. As a Microsoft developer from “the early” I usually only had to worry about a new version of Visual Studio,…
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A team is a group of people … A group of people is NOT a team
In my work as a consultant I visit many companies. Sometimes for a day and sometimes for a longer period. What I see more than once is that organizations are still organized as departments. For example an application support department or an IT-Pro department. Surely this is not a problem.…
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Build fails when associating work items
Recently I ran into a strange problem. I modified a work item type definition and added a field. So far, so good. The field could be edited and everyone was happy. But after that, my build failed. As you may or may not know you can choose to associate work…
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Trigger a vNext release template from a build definition throws Http Error 500
Last week I was busy with some work on a vNext Release template. When my release worked I wanted to trigger that release from my build definition. Where as in the agent-based Release Management it was a matter of checking a checkbox and using a different Build Template that triggers…
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Making a Work Item Read Only when it has a certain state
I am busy at a customer with implementing some security rules on work items. As you might or moght not know the work item security is quite limited. My scenario is as follows: Only users in group XYZ kan make a state transition from [Draft] to [Approved] When the item…
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Start with Visual Studio Release Management vNext–VS RM for Dummies
Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3 came with Visual Studio Release Management vNext. vNext is, next to the deployments with agents, another way of doing deployments with VSRM. The most important thing in vNext is that you can do deployments to machines, without having to install an agent. This is…
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Bulk destroy Work Items from Team Foundation Server
WARNING: Destroy work items is a irreversible action so use with caution and at your own risk! Lately I am quire busy with all kinds of migration work to Team Foundation Server. This means a lot of testing, modifying and re-testing. Because the target Team Project has quite some modifications…
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Insert an inline image into a Work Item with the TFS API
On the verge of 2014 I wanted to share a last post with you. At the moment I am working on a migration tool to migrate from another system to TFS 2013. The source system contains a lot of items with a description that contains images. Not as an attachment but…
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Silently install and configure a TFS Build server with Powershell DSC
A while ago Powershell Desired State Configurations (DSC) was introduced. Powershell DSC allows you to create a configuration of a specific machine in a powershell file. The Powershell engine takes care of rolling out this configuration. This configuration snippet makes sure a IIS is present. If it already is it…
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Create a Trend chart in Visual Studio Online
As you might have noticed from some of my previous posts on this blog, I really like reports. I wrote about how to customize them (here, here and here), how you should use them in your ALM implementation and how to use PowerPivot to your advantage. When you read these…
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Creating welcome pages on VSO made easy with Markdown files
In of the recent updates on Visual Studio Online a very nice feature was introduced. Welcome pages. When you want to share some information about you project or other information with your team, what is the place to do that? When working on-premise you maybe have a SharePoint portal or…
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Error in TFS 2013 build – Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.WebApi
Recently I installed TFS 2013.2 and modified some Build Templates. I also installed a separate Build Server that executes these builds for me. My build template was based on the default TFS 2013 Build template (Tfvctemplate.12.xaml) When my build executed, it ran for a while, but eventually it stopped with…
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Download Visual Studio Web Installers as a complete package
When you download Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, Team Explorer etc. from the public Microsoft site you always get a small Web installer. Surely enough this does not contain al files, so when you click it, it starts downloading the remaining Gigabytes. This is nasty sometimes when you are at…
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Add permissions with TFSSecurity–The ultimate reference
UPDATE 7/15/2015: Hayder Casey from Microsoft provided me with the details on using the Tagging namespace. You can use this one to set the [Create Tag Definition] security setting. UPDATE 4/25/2016: Microsoft has now updated MSDN to have decent documentation on MSDN found here Sooner or later, every TFS Administrator…
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TFS Reports–Unleash them with PowerPivot
A long time ago I wrote a blog series about writing Custom Reports for Team Foundation Server. As you may or may not know, Team Foundation Server comes with a powerful reporting solution. A relational TFS Warehouse and a Data Cube which contains the aggregated and historical data. In my…
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Printing work items with Team Foundation Server
With the introduction of TFS 2012 Web Access we lost the possibility to print work items from the web. The experience wasn’t great in the first place but now it disappeared. Also in Visual Studio we do not have great printing possibilities. For some teams this is a big issue.…
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The Road to Continuous Delivery–Part 1
Introduction Continuous Delivery. You hear and read a lot about it lately and it seems to be or become a trend. What I see in the field is that companies think about Continuous Delivery but are not completely sure what it actually means. Let alone that they can oversee the…
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Integrate Uservoice with Visual Studio Online using ServiceHooks
At TechEd USA a very cool feature VSO integration was announced in the first keynote. It was short, but nevertheless very cool and promising. In this post I willI talk about the integration of Uservoice with Visual Studio Online. Uservoice Uservoice is a service that enables companies to manage their…
The Road to ALM 