In case you haven’t heard, VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 are officially scheduled for release on March 22nd. If you’re into playing with Betas (I know I am) and have an MSDN subscription you can go download it now. Those of you without subscriptions will need to wait about a week or so. What I like most about this version of VS2010 is that someone at Microsoft finally wised up and realized that selling a gazillion different flavors wasn’t working and just confused/angered everyone. So now they’ve got just three: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate...

If you’re like me and need to do code-reviews of other people’s stuff or maybe you just want to see everything that’s changed during a certain period of a project, then here’s a nice PowerShell tip for you. First, make sure you’ve downloaded the latest version of the Team Foundation Powertools. Starting with the October ‘08 release, the tools now include a PowerShell snap-in that add several commands which enable rich interaction with your Team Foundation Server. Of particular interest to us for this exercise though is the Get-TfsItemHistory command. Now, let’s assume a scenario where we...

Guess we can look forward to the first service pack for VS 2005 in Sept. For details, check out this page over on MSDN.

Run, don't walk, over to Channel9 and check out this awesome demonstration of all the capabilities of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. Then click here to download the latest CTP which was released last week. While database projects weren't amazing in VS2003, I was extremely frustrated that they absolutely crippled the feature in VS2005. You can't generate .dat files anymore, it doesn't generate command files anymore and it generates schema files in a completely diff. fashion than 2003. Not cool at all. Luckily this new Team Edition for DBs really makes up for it 100x over... just wish it was released...

Inspired by Craig's MSDNMan, Ian has created an MSDN browser with WPF. If, like me, you read a ton of MSDN content every day, both of these tools are extreeeemely welcome additions to browsing the online content or using the installed version of the content.

There are a couple ways to approach structuring your Team Projects depending on what you want to accomplish (see the answer to the "Should I create a team project per application or per release?" in the FAQ). Consider the per application scenario, where you have a single Team Project with multiple trunks per-version:$/My Project    |- Main    |- Version 1.1    |- Version 1.2    |- ... etc ... A Team Build, by default, will apply the build label at the Team Project level (in this case $/My Project). Then, in order to gather changeset and work item details for the build report, it looks...

Microsoft's mea cupla for screwing up the web project model with the Web Site Project type has been released. We've been using it here at Mimeo ever since we started our 2.0/2005 migration and had great success wth it even in the beta stages. The differences between RC1 and Release are surprisingly big, but I guess they did enough internal testing to feel it was solid enough and pushed it out the door. Read all about it on Scott Guthrie's blog and/or download it from here. Big thanks to the team that worked on getting this out there! Oh and make...

I made a post to the Team Build forums about two weeks ago about the inability to use multiple .testrunconfig settings in a Team Build and, unfortunately, haven't heard back from anyone on it yet. So I figured I'd post it here in case anyone else is stumbles across the limitation and is looking for help. The problem lies in the way that you specify test lists and test configurations in a Team Build build type. While you can technically supply multiple test meta-data files per build type, you can only supply one test configuration for them all to run under. This stems from...

So Mimeo has officially made the shift to VS 2005/.NET 2.0 this weekend. Part of that was cutting over to Team Foundation Server completely. We've been using TFS for about a month now with great success, but we've only been using the Work Item Tracking features thus far. This weekend, I finally migrated our Visual Source Safe Database over to Team Foundation Version Control. It's quite simple and well documented here on MSDN. However, I did encounter one error during my experimentation phase: Unable to write to SQL Server: .\SQLEXPRESS due to Error: The size (4969) given to the parameter 'Mappings' exceeds...

It's late and I'm definitely overtired and getting that halo effect around my monitor, but... am I missing something or does VS 2005 give you no way to do PDBOnly builds through the IDE? Well, in any case I made it do it by editing the csproj, which is just an MSBuild file, by hand. All you have to do is go into the file and find the <PropertyGroup> that corresponds to your configuration and platform, in my case Release|AnyCPU, and edit the <DebugType> property to be “pdbonly” instead of “none”.  I certainly hope I'm just missing some checkbox somewhere because I don't know...

I just posted this question to the forums, but I figured I'd post here as well in case anybody subscribers out there know the answer and also for future edification: I create a new ASP.NET performance session and point it at my web application directory (i.e. not using IIS). Now, I can sucessfully get performance data for the web site itself, but I cannot seem to get performance data for any other project assemblies I've configured for instrumentation. At first I noticed that it was instrumenting the project assemblies in their respective project \bin directory as opposed to my web site's \bin directory....

Wow, ask and ye shall receive! James Manning has released an initial implentation of an MSH provider for TFSC. Make sure to check out the MSH Community Workspace, where he contributed the source, too! Update: James contacted me to let me know about two things: I had a little typo in the title (“TSFC” instead of “TFSC”) which I've fixed I should probably be calling it TFVC from now on... Team Foundation Version Control vs. Team Foundation Source Control. Thanks James!

Alright, when's there going to be an TFS snap-in for MSH? Sure I can use the .NET classes directly (and am), but I want a TFSC: provider! I want a TFWIT: provider! :)

Here's a heads up for anyone else out there working with Team Test Projects: If you use an App.config in a Team Test Project and you make changes to it and then try to run the test again from the Test View the project will not redeploy the .config file to the bin directory with the test assembly. You must explicitly rebuild the test project to cause this to happen. I spent about five minutes scratching my head on this one, so hopefully this will spare at least one other person out there from wasting anymore than that on it. ;)

We had to go from single server, on test hardware, in separated domain to dual servers, both new hardware in a new domain. We had to try twice as the first time our SharePoint and Report servers weren't connecting to their DBs correctly, but it's all working flawlessly now! The documentation was basically spot on, so I suggest reading every step twice before you perform it. Now we have ~180 days to try and purchase Team Foundation Server and VSTS client flavors. That seems like it's going to be a lot tougher thing to accomplish than actually getting the stuff installed. :\ Oh and...

Now that TFS has RTM'd, check here for documentation about migrating your test environments to a production environment. I've been eagerly awaiting this documentation so that we can finally get off our slow ass VM evaluation environment onto some brand spankin' new hardware purchased to run TFS and nothin' but TFS! ;) I'll be sure to post our experience with this process once it's complete.

Holy hell, has anyone else tried to purchase Team System or even get information about purchasing Team System from Microsoft? It's ridiculous. People don't even know about transitioning your MSDN Universal subscription. That's all I wanted to do to start is transition to MSDN + Team Suite (where ya pay a little more money, but save overall). Three diff. people I talked to didn't know what the hell I was talking about. We're in the Empower program, but even they couldn't help. You'd almost think they don't want us to be able to buy this stuff. :\