The art of simplicity

For some time, I had an error when opening a specific Visual Studio solution. After a problematic merge operation, the Team Foundation Server Source Control binding information inside my solution file didn’t match with the projects I had in my solution. If I opened up the sln file, I could find the following section: Global     GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution         SccNumberOfProjects = 92         SccEnterpriseProvider = {4CA58AB2-18FA-4F8D-95D4-32DDF27D184C}         SccTeamFoundationServer = http://mytfsserver:8080/tfs/defaultcollection         SccLocalPath0 = . The number of projects(92) was complete wrong. Visual Studio told me there should be 68 projects:   I found an easy solution to fix this: Close the solution in Visual Studio Check...

After configuring a Continuous Integration build for a TypeScript enabled web application, the build turned red with the following error message: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\TypeScript\Microsoft.TypeScript.targets (118): "tsc.exe" exited with code 1. On the build server I had installed the TypeScript components for Visual Studio 2013 , but for this particular project we were still using Visual Studio 2012. I was able to fix the problem by installing the TypeScript 1.0 Tools for Visual Studio 2012 on the build server.

Last week I noticed the following blog post by Cory House; Two Quick TFS Performance Tips . It’s a small post, but one with great value… In his post, he shares one of the greatest performance tips ever about TFS; create a separate workspace for each Team Project . How many times I heard a developer complain that TFS was slow and cumbersome to use… And when I took a look at his Visual Studio solution I had to discover that his 5 years of developer work was all sitting in the same workspace. Ugh…

In Team Foundation Server, you can set a picture for your user profile. This picture is shown at different locations inside the TFS Web Access. As long as you don’t set a picture, you only get a boring icon. For example the Team members overview looks like this on the Overview page of your TFS project: Let’s change this! Navigate to the Web Access url of the Team project that has the User Profiles you want to set. Navigate to the Administration page by clicking on the Wheel icon in the upper right corner. Click on the Security tab Select Users from the left panel Select the User Profile you want to edit. Click on the image on the top right hand corner to edit the image. In the Profile Image dialog, upload your image and Save Changes . That’s it! If we now look at the Team Members again, you’ll see: Remark: This change will be applied to all your Team projects. Another way to ...

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers team released a list of cool, productive and recommended community widgets for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server at http://aka.ms/widgets . A must have for every TFS administrator!

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers team keeps bringing us high quality content around ALM and Team Foundation Server. This week they released a new version of the ‘TFS Planning and Disaster Recovery Avoidance Guide’ (pfew, what a mouthful). “ This guidance delivers practical and scenario based guidance for the implementation of Team Foundation Server (TFS). It guides you through the decisions whether to have one or more Team Foundation Servers, one or more Team Project Collections, one or more Team Projects and one or more Teams, based on scenarios and implications of each decision. It concludes with disaster recovery planning, frequently asked questions and a collection of real world reference stories.”

The team from OpsHub, the creators of the (commercially available) OpsHub Integration Manager , released the OpsHub Visual Studio Online Migration Utility .  This finally introduces a solution to migrate your on premise TFS data to TFS online. OpsHub Visual Studio Online Migration utility helps customers wanting to migrate the most commonly requested data from an on-premises Team Foundation Server to their Visual Studio Online account.  It is designed for basic migration scenarios to migrate history of version control changesets, work items, test cases, and test results. Features: Easy to use and helps user make intelligent need based decision. One-way migration from on-premises Team Foundation Server to Visual Studio Online. Change history is preserved during migration with original details included in work item revision history and version control changeset comments. Entities supported include : Version Control Wo...

With the change from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010, with the introduction of the TFS collections, Microsoft completely reorganized the database structure. This makes it impossible to just attach your TFS 2008 databases to an existing TFS 2010/2012 environment. You can not attach a collection as the concept of a collection didn’t exist yet in 2008. So how can we fix this? Luckily Microsoft did all the work for us and introduced a command line option in TFSconfig to import an old TFS 2008 database and attach it as a new collection. Export the TFS 2008 databases Import the databases to the database server that you use for your TFS 2012 instance Log on to your TFS 2012 application server Open a command prompt(run as an administrator) Go to the TFS tools directory: c:\program files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Tools Run the tfsconfig command with the following options: tfsconfig import /SQLInstance: <instancename> /CollectionName: <new collecti...

Last week, we finally found some time to upgrade our company TFS environment to Team Foundation 2013. The upgrade didn’t go as smooth as we wanted. The installation immediately failed with the following error message: TF400167 : Installation failed for the package(netfxfullredist_43) with the following status 0x800713EC, restart state 00x0 If you see this error, don’t panic. It’s an easy one to fix. When you install Team Foundation Server 2013, .NET 4.5.1 will be installed first as a prerequisite. The thing is that the .NET 4.5.1 installation requires 2.8GB(!) of free space to install. We only had 2GB of free disk space available, so this explained the error message. Cleaning up some old files on the TFS server, solved the issue and the installation could continue…

Although there is a lot of information out there about customizing Team Foundation Server, it’s not always easy to find. KathrynE gaves us a nice Christmas present by grouping all this information together in one blog post . It gives you links to topics that show how to configure or customize areas related to version control, build, work tracking, and testing using TFS. Go check it out!

A customer reported me the following problem with their TFS Build Server: We had several occurrences of an error on the build development server that prevents the build controller from starting. In the TFS Event log on the server, this error message appears: Exception Message: The build service host XXX is currently owned by XXX. A service host may only be active on one machine at a time. (type BuildServiceHostOwnershipException) A service restart will not correct this error. One workaround we found is to reinitialize the build server status in the Team Foundation Server collection database. Execute the following steps to do this: Determine what is the ServiceHostId of your build server (to get a key for the update): Update the record to reinitialize status: Remark: Be careful! This is a workaround, NOT an officially supported solution.

A customer forwarded me the following error message they got when trying to create a new Team Project in TFS 2012: Error TF30169: The New Team Project Wizard was unable to download the process template MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0. Explanation The New Team Project Wizard encountered an unexpected error while attempting to download the process template. The download returned the following error: The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\TPW_tmp931A.tmp\Build\Templates\' because it is being used by another process. User Action Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator. I was able to solve it by clearing the Visual Studio Team Explorer cache. Execute the following steps: Close Visual Studio if it’s open Delete the Team Foundation cache on the client (be careful, delete the content of the folder only, not the cache folder itself) C:\Users\<yourusername>\Local Settings\...

While looking through some TFS information I noticed the following fun fact. It seems that Team Foundation Server is using the Lernout & Hauspie speech technology : Remark: This is a blog post that probably only the Belgian readers will understand. It’s a long story about what happened with Lernout & Hauspie(read the wikipedia article if you want to know more).

With the September 9 release of Team Foundation Service, a nice new feature was released that allows you to create charts from your work item query results. Each query now has a new Charts view. From that view you can create charts based on the data returned by the query. To test the feature, execute the following steps: Go to your Team Foundation Service instance: .visualstudio.com/">https://<instancename>.visualstudio.com/ Click on a project on the Overview page On your project dashboard click on the WORK tab Click on the Queries tab Click on the Charts option in the Query view Click on New Chart to create your first Chart. The Configure Chart dialog is loaded Choose a chart type on the left and a ‘Group by’ option on the right. A preview of the chart is shown. Click OK to add the Chart to the Query view. Nice!

With the release of Visual Studio 2012 and the improved Sharepoint integration, building, packaging and deploying your Sharepoint solutions became a lot easier. Still if you want to get everything running on your build server, you’ve got some work to do. On your TFS 2012 Build server, the following components need to be installed: If Visual Studio 2012 Professional (or above) is installed, install the following component Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 If Visual Studio 2012 Professional (or above) is NOT installed, you will need to collect build dependencies from a machine with the following product installed: Visual Studio 2012 Professional (or above) Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint Server 2013 Run the following PowerShell command to make sure your PowerShell execution policy i...

I always enjoy browsing through Team Foundation Service, the cloud version of  TFS.  Every day I discover new functionality and features. Last week I noticed that administrators are able to create team alerts for other users. You could already do this by using the Alerts Explorer from the TFS Power Tools but then those alerts are actually owned by the person creating them and not able to be managed, edited, or disabled for the person they are intended. Afterwards I went back to our on premise TFS environment to notice that the same functionality was also available there… To use this feature: Open the Team Foundation Server web access Browse to a specific Team Project Click on the configuration icon in the right corner to go the configuration section On the Overview page click on a Team name: On the Team configuration page, click on alerts In the Administrator actions on the left, you can search for another user After selecting ...

Microsoft made it possible from the beginning to extend TFS or do some basic programming against a TFS server by using the TFS object model. The only problem(next to the lack of good documentation) is that you had to install Visual Studio or Team Explorer to be able to use this. In TFS 2012, Microsoft finally create a stand-alone installer that would just install the programmability components – making for a faster, smaller and less impactful install. You can download the installer here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f30e5cc7-036e-449c-a541-d522299445aa Remark: you still need proper licenses/CALs.

If you see a TFS installation(or the installation of an update) fail with the following error message : Error: TF400534: Package (tfs_objectmodel_x64) caching failed with the following status: 0x80070001 it probably means that your installation media is corrupt. Just download it again and restart the installation procedure.

Short anwer: NO . Somewhat longer answer: Starting from TFS 2012 Microsoft switched to a faster pace, releasing new functionality every 3 months through so called ‘Updates’. There have been 3 updates for TFS 2012. If you want to upgrade just take the latest version, all previous updates will be applied as well.

When looking at the TFS 2012 Web Access, I noticed that there are 3 possible Build States: ‘queued’, ‘completed’, ‘deployed’ ‘queued’ and ‘completed’ I was aware of but ‘deployed’ I had never noticed before. I found out that the ‘deployed’ value is only set when you are using the Azure integration. But if you really want to use it yourself, you can always set the value through Powershell: