Category: Guidance
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Deleting (or destroying) a Global List with the TFS API
One of the most used features in TFS Work Items are Global Lists. We use global lists very frequently because it save a lot of time in maintaining list data amongst different Team Projects. What we also do very often is adding and removing items to and from a global…
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Changing the product backlog in TFS 2012
Recently I was at a customer who used the MSF for Agile Software Development template in Team Foundation Server 2012. As he was doing Scrum with this template he had the need to show Bugs in the Product Backlog view as well. Just like User Stories he wanted to plan…
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Hidden Gems in TFS 2012–Part 8 Related Work Items in a Build Report
In this series of blog posts I like to highlight some features of TFS/Visual Studio that people seem to overlook. In my day to day job I often see that people don’t know about certain feature that are available in Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio or some of the Powertools.…
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Changing the Available work Items in Visual Studio 2012
Visual Studio 2012 drastically changed the Team Explorer. Not only the UI Changed a lot. Also the way of working within Team Explorer changed. Team Explorer now has the notion of a “My Work” tab, that displays all relevant information to you. It displays In progress Work Items, Available Work…
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Custom Build Activities Type is greyed out in Build Definition editor
Lately I am quite busy with building Custom Build activities for TFS 2012. I also did this in TFS 2010 but it seems that I avoided some issues there. In my previous blog posts I described some migration issues with TFS build. This is about an issue I had with…
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Moving source from one TFS to another
A while ago somebody asked me for an easy way to move source from one TFS to another. He struggled with that, because TFS kept asking for the old server. Even when he removed all the *.vssscc files and unbinded the solution with [Change Source Control] the old server popped…
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Audit Trail on TFS Source Control.
Today I got the question if I could see when a person did a Get Latest Version on TFS Source Control. Check-ins are easily found in the Source Control History but Get Latest Versions are not in the history. After some searching I found the tbl_Command in the TFS Collection…
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Reparent of a TFS Source Controlled Branch. Why and How !
When I first looked at the Source Control Explorer in TFS 2012, the thing I noticed first was the introduction of the “Reparent” Menu option in the context menu. I know that this is not new, It was there in Visual Studio 2010 as well only it was hidden away…
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‘Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IProjectFile’ is obsolete
For my customer I was implementing some advanced BuildNumbering mechanism (Here can you find a good post about this). Because it was important that the stuff worked, I wrote some Unit Tests. I usually do that and need IBuildDetail. Jim Lamb has a great post about how to stub The…
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TFS Source Control 2012–Workspaces Part 2
As promised in my previous post, in this post I will tell a little bit more about workspaces. When creating a new workspace (and I explained why you need to do that in my previous post) or editing an existing one, the dialog pops up. In 2012 it shows a…
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TFS Source Control 2012–Workspaces Part 1
Source Control is one of the oldest parts of Team Foundation Server and probably the most used one as well. Every version of Source Control introduced some new functionality. A short historical overview of the key adjustments TFS 2005 brought the first version. SQL Server based version control as a…
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Using WorkItemTrackingCacheRoot in your web.config files
I frequently build custom tooling against the TFS API. Sometimes Windows Applications but most of the time I build Web Applications. When building Web Applications it is no secret that your application runs under the credentials of the application pool. When accessing work items via TFS API from your web…
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Lessons learned in upgrading my TFS 2010 Build templates to TFS 2012
Awaiting the Visual Studio 2012 Launch I am preparing our builds to work on TFS 2012. In my previous post I described that I updated the references and imported some namespaces and then everything worked! Because there were some issues with our current builds, I decided to restructure our build…
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Upgrading your Custom Build Template to TFS 2012
In the past years I have been quite busy with customizing the build for both my own and also custom organizations. Today I was experimenting with the build definitions on my TFS 2012 Release Candidate installation. I attached a TFS 2010 Team Project Collection to my TFS 2012 Server as…
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Want to implement an ALM process? Focus on the output!
Want to implement an ALM process? Focus on the output! In my previous article “Implement TFS or ALM? Same or different?” , I talked about the differences between an ALM implementation and a TFS Implementation. Today I like to talk about the change process that is involved when an ALM…
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Error when copying Build Template “The type ‘TfsBuild.Process’ already contains a definition for…”
I do quite a lot of Build customizations and usually I create a new Build Template for each type of Build I want to do. You can choose to copy the file in the Build Definition Editor or you can just Copy/Paste the file in Windows Explorer. The advantage of…
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How to deal with generic libraries in TFS
Last year I wrote an article about how to deal with generic libraries in TFS for a Dutch Magazine called Dot Net Magazine. This article was published in both the online as printed magazine. The online magazine has moved to another site and this article is now published on the…
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What If…You delete a work item field ?
Recently I was doing some work on Work Items. I had to remove a field from a Work Item and wondered what would happen with History etc.. In this blog post I describe the things that happen if you delete a field from a Work Item Type Definition. For this…
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Implement TFS or ALM? Same or different?
Introduction The answer to the question in the title probably varies from person to person. Some people will say that an implementation of Team Foundation Server (TFS) automatically implies an implementation of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Other people will say that this is not the case and you don’t get…
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Create TFS Event Subscription programmatically with TFS API
Event Subscriptions in TFS are a very powerful mechanism to get notification about event happening in TFS. You can use the Alerts Explorer, that comes with the TFS Powertools (like I describe in this post), but sometimes it is easier to create subscriptions automatically. In this post I will show…
The Road to ALM 