If you're interested in playing around and testing VSTS 2008 and TFS 2008, but don't want to waste too much time getting the software installed? Good news! The trial Virtual PC images have been updated! Download your play area right here.
The image will not expire until December 31st 2008.
"This virtual machine is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Build 2008, Team Explorer 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and all necessary prerequisites. In addition, it has been updated with Office 2007 SP1, current Windows Updates as of March 25, 2008, and the December Release of the TFS Power Tools. Team Foundation Server is installed in workgroup authentication mode and thus does not require a domain controller. "
Today is a good day for a laugh... I love this one.
I've blogged before about the availability of design specs on the next version of Visual Studio Team System. Well, another group of Rosario specs have been recently published on the Rosario Specs website:
· TFS Bug Submission Portal
· Send Mail from TFS
· Work Item Tracking Linking
If you feel like participating visit the spec discussion forum.
The next version of Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server is codenamed "Rosario". No formal release date has been made public yet, but if you want to see and participate in upcoming features, then check out the spec-share page on MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb936702.aspx.
On Gert 'data dude' Drapers blog there is the announcement for Power Tools for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition.
Features include:
Command line SQL Static Code Analysis execution through MSBuild;
Data Generation Wizard;
File based data generator;
XML based data generator;
Unique Regular Expression generator;
Refactoring Command Generator has been made available as a MSBuild task;
Two new test conditions for Database Unit Tests:
- ChecksumCondition – Which you can use to verify that the checksum of the data set returned by a database unit test matches the checksum of an expected data set.
- ExpectedSchemaTestCondition – Which you use to verify that the column names and data types of the returned data set match expected values.
In this blog the release schedule for SQL Server is explained and it becomes clear that SQL Server 2008 won't become available until 2008-Q3. Now aside from SQL Server 2008 not becoming available, this also means that the business intelligence suite which comes with SQL Server, the one you need to create SSIS packages and SQL Server reports, will not RTM until Q3. This in turn means that you won't be able to use these designers in Visual Studio 2008. The Business Intelligence Suite uses the Visual Studio Shell and integrates in such an excellent manner that it is quite thightly bound to a specific version of Visual Studio. The SQL Server 2005 Suite is bound to VS2005 and the SQL Server 2008 Suite is bound to VS2008. So if you're planning on moving to VS2008 you'll have to run VS2005 as well, at least until 2008-Q3.
The TFS MSSCCI Provider enables integrated use of Team Foundation Version Control with products that do not support Team Explorer integration. This will allow you to connect to TFS2008 from Visual Studio 2003. This is very useful if you still have .NET 1.1 projects around that need maintenance using VS2003, but you want to use a single source control solution.
Download here.
VS2008 hasn't even been fully launched yet and already the add-ons are becoming available through the VSTS 2008 Power Tools. These power tools are very handy and also offer some bugfixes so you don't have to wait for a service release.
New in this release of the power tools:
- Find in Source Control tool is an addition to the Team Explorer menu that provides the ability to locate files and folders in source control by the item’s status or with a wildcard expression.
- Open a selected folder in Windows Explorer straight from Team Explorer. This feature allows you to jump straight to the mapped folder location from within Source Control Explorer.
- Quick Label feature that allows labels to be easily applied to a given selection of files and folders in the Source Control Explorer.
- Build Notification tool that runs in the Windows task bar notification area monitoring the status of the build definitions you have specified. It can be configured to show notifications when builds are queued, started, or completed for multiple build definitions spanning multiple Team Foundation Servers.
- Additional TFPT.EXE commands for configuring Team Explorer connection settings (tweakui) and for destroying Work Items and Work Items Type Definitions (destroyWI, destroyWITD).
- Updates to the TFS Best Practices Analyzer for use with a Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server deployment.
- The Process Template Editor is updated for use with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. It also has several improvements, including: the ability to launch standalone w/o a Visual Studio installation, performance improvements, improved discoverability and bug fixes.
- Bug fixes and removal of Power Tools that are now included within Team Foundation Server:
- Annotate and Treedif are now included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer; however, Annotate remains is still available in the command-line tool (TFPT.EXE).
- TestToolsTask is included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server as part of Team Foundation Build.
With certifications like 70-620 and 70-291 on ones credit, one can easily go for 646-171. In fact, even 642-825 is not difficult for such people. However, exams like 640-863 and 350-001 require much more preparation time and effort, than that required for a basic exam like 1z0-042.
If you're looking at using Team Foudation Server, but your organization uses more than just Visual Studio, then perhaps Teamprise is a useful tool for you.
"Teamprise is a suite of client applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server from outside of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Teamprise enables software development teams to use the source control, work item tracking, documents, and reporting features of Team Foundation Server from within the Eclipse IDE, and from other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X."
If you've been using Team Foundation Server 2005 and created one or more branches then you'll probably have noticed that when you look at a files history it will only show it to you for the current branch. When determining the history of a file this is definately not good enough. Luckily Yonatan Leonov created a little Visual Studio Add-In which allows you to see the complete history of a file. It's available for free on CodePlex. Go here.
Typed DataSets offer a great way to implement the interaction with a database. When using typed datasets in conjunction with source control, like Team Foundation Server, then things get a little tricky. TFS offers optimistic check out (a.k.a. side by side checkout), which means that multiple persons can work on a file at once. If a conflict is detected upon checking in, then the user has the option to use a mergetool to resolve the differences. This works great for most source files, but not so good on designer generated files. This problem manifests itseld a lot around typed datasets, where merging the designer generated files can wreak havoc on your sources and 'break' the designer.
Instead I prefer to use exclusive checkout when editing typed datasets.
To set your source control to allow exclusive checkouts go to the Options page in Visual Studio and set 'Editing' to 'Prompt for exclusive checkouts':
Next time when you are editing a source controlled typed dataset you will get the following question:
Choose the second option (outlined in red) and you'll be fine when checking in.
Sometimes, like before starting a build, you want to see how many files are checked out, which pending changes there are and who still has pending work. VSTS does not offer a standard report for this, but you can use the tf.exe command line tool to query for this information: tf status "$/ProjectName" /server:ServerName /recursive /user:*
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools has been released and is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=da3f11ad-bd54-4eda-b08c-4df84df0d641&displaylang=en
The Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools is a set of enhancements and tools that compliment and improve the user experience of Team Edition for Database Professionals.
This release includes 5 new refactoring types, a new dependency viewer, additional data generators and editors, 2 new MSBuild tasks for Schema and Data Compare as well as the introduction of the TSQL Static Code Analysis feature
TSQL Static Code Analysis
• Static Code Analysis - A precursor to the functionality that will be in future versions of VSTS that will allow you to perform Static Code Analysis on T-SQL code.
Refactoring
• “Move Schema” Refactoring - Allows a user to right click on an object and move it to a different but existing schema
• SP Rename Generation - Generate a new script that will contain sp_renames for all rename refactored objects that the user can then execute.
• Wildcard Expansion - Automatically expand the wildcard in a select to the appropriate columns.
• Fully-Qualified Name Support - Automatically inject fully-qualified names when absent in a script
• Refactoring extended to Dataset - Refactor into strongly typed dataset definitions
MSBuild Tasks
• Data / Schema Compare Build Tasks - MSBuild tasks that can generate scripts as if the user had run the Data / Schema compare UI
Schema View
• API Access to Schema View - Insert / Update / Delete to schema View and list schema objects and their associated files
Dependency Tool Window
• Dependency Tree - Show the dependencies ( incoming / outgoing ) for selected schema objects in a new tool window
Miscellaneous Tools
• Script Preprocessor - Expand SQLCMD variables and include files and command line version (sqlspp.exe) & an MSBuild version ( wraps the command line version )
It's hard to keep up, just this weekend I was installing VS2008 Team System beta 2 only to find that the Community Technology Preview of Rosario is already available for download.
'Rosario' is codename for the Visual Studio Team System release that will come after Visual Studio Team System 2008 (which was codenamed 'Orcas').
Brian Harry writes:
One of our primary focuses for this release is what we call "Business Alignment". This is about making sure you know what your development organization is doing, why they are doing it and how it is coming compared to plan. There are many features coming to support this goal and I'll talk about a few of them here. Some of them you can see in this CTP include:
- A focus on requirements and traceability. Among other things, the MSF CMMI guidance has been updated to include new work item types and reports. MSF Agile will be updated in the future.
- Hierarchical work items for work breakdown and status rollups.
- Extensible link types to be able to relate work in whatever ways fit your process.
- Querying over links to enable traceability and easily answering hard questions about ongoing work.
- Querying based on group membership to be able to scope to the people on your team easily.
Portland, ME: Thursday August 9th 2007 at 6:00pm.
Chris Bowen will be presenting on Visual Studio 2008.
More info.
Recently I've started using VSTS for DB Pro. I've installed CTP 2 of Service Release 1, and it's been great.
The VSTS DB Pro team plans to release power tools for VSTS DB Pro as well. These are tools that will be released as soon as possible, without having to wait for a major release.
The Power Tools are listed on the Future Release page of VSTS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb407307.aspx
Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools
| Feature |
Description |
| “Move Schema” Refactoring |
Allows a user to right click on an object and move it to a different but existing schema |
| SP Rename Generation |
Generate a new script that will contain sp_renames for all rename refactored objects that the user can then execute. |
| Data / Schema Compare Build Tasks |
MSBuild tasks that can generate scripts as if the user had run the Data / Schema compare UI |
| Script Preprocessor |
Expand SQLCMD variables and include files and command line version (sqlspp.exe) & an MSBuild version ( wraps the command line version ) |
| API Access to Schema View |
Insert / Update / Delete to schema View and list schema objects and their associated files |
| Data / Schema Compare Build Tasks |
MSBuild tasks that can generate scripts as if the user had run the Data / Schema compare UI |
| Dependency Tree |
Show the dependencies ( incoming / outgoing ) for selected objects in a new tool window |
| Static Code Analysis |
A precursor to the functionality that will be in future versions of VSTS that will allow you to perform Static Code Analysis on T-SQL code. |
| Wildcard Expansion |
Automatically expand the wildcard in a select to the appropriate columns. |
| Fully-Qualified Name Support |
Automatically inject fully-qualified names when absent in a script |
| Schema Reporting |
DBSpecGen functionality for the project system allows you to easily document your database schema. |
Today Microsoft released the Beta 1 of Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guide. It's the Microsoft playbook for TFS. This is the guide to help show you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server. It's a distillation of many lessons learned. It's a collaborative effort among product team members, field, industry experts, MVPs, and customers.
Contents at a Glance
- Part I, Fundamentals
- Part II, Source Control
- Part III, Builds
- Part IV, Large Project Considerations
- Part V, Project Management
- Part VI, Process Guidance
- Part VII, Reporting
- Part VIII, Setting Up and Maintaining the Team Environment
Chapters
- Introduction
- Ch 01 - Introducing the Team Environment
- Ch 02 - Team Foundation Server Architecture
- Ch 03 - Structuring Projects and Solutions
- Ch 04 - Structuring Projects and Solutions in Team Foundation Server
- Ch 05 - Defining Your Branching and Merging Strategy
- Ch 06 - Managing Source Control Dependencies in Visual Studio Team System
- Ch 07 - Team Build Explained
- Ch 08 - Setting Up Continuous Integration with Team Build
- Ch 09 - Setting Up Scheduled Builds with Team Build
- Ch 10 - Large Project Considerations
- Ch 11 - Project Management Explained
- Ch 12 - Work Items Explained
- Ch 13 – MSF Agile Projects
- Ch 14 - Process Templates Explained
- Ch 15 - Reporting Explained
- Ch 16 - Team Foundation Server Deployment
- Ch 17 - Providing Internet Access to Team Foundation Server
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