Category: Tips & Tricks
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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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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…
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Visual Studio 2013 freezes when performing Load Test on Azure
Since the release of Visual Studio 2013 a few weeks ago we have the possibility to use the immense power of the cloud to perform Load Tests on our public websites. This is a Team Foundation Service feature and can be used when you have a TF Service account. For…
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Use Visual Studio as your Diff and Merging Tool for local files
Probably you are familiar with the Diff tool that Visual Studio provides when doing Source Control. When comparing two files from Source Control Explorer or the Solution Explorer you get this nice tool that shows a nice visual compare of two files. You can choose 2 local files, a source…
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Use Advanced search when TFS does not find text in work items
Alert: Editing the TFS Collection database is tricky and should be done with extreme care!! Recently I migrated a whole bunch of work items from a StarTeam repository. To keep some of the initial history, I added a some summary in the description field of the work item. This looked…
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Using Local workspaces – Promote Excluded changes with TFS 2012 API
Since the introduction of Local workspaces in TFS 2012 I use them where I can. I really like the concept of local workspaces as it gives me much more flexibility when working with my files. (read more about Server and Local Workspaces in my previous post(s)) Local workspaces are also…
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Top 10 of things every TFS Administrator should do
I spent a fair amount of time on different social media channels like Twitter (@renevo)and LinkedIn and I noticed an interesting thing. Every time someone posts a Top 10 of things or tips it receives a lot of positive comments. It is a fact. People like lists and I tend…
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How to set up networking for your Hyper-V (TFS) machine
Since a few months I am the happy owner of a great laptop with SSD. Because I am running Windows 8 I can have the possibility to use Hyper-V on my local machine and that’s….Let’s say….GREAT !! Now that I have this possibility, I run my TFS demo machine on…
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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 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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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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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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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…
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Where to store my documents in TFS
As a Team Foundation Server user you have several possibilities to store your documents. Multiple options are always nice but it is also confusing if you do not exactly know what to do. As a result of this, I often hear the same question. Where to store my documents ?…
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My favorite TFS tools and links
I use TFS for a number of years now and I have a few tools and links that I always take with me. Let me share them with you Team Foundation SideKicks by Attrice http://www.attrice.info/cm/tfs/ This tools has some great features for doing administration tasks in TFS. Looking at checked…
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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…
The Road to ALM 