Planet SCM

A few things that I've run across in the last few days...

1) If you have both TFS and Team Explorer installed on the same server, you may not upgrade just one of them to the SP1 Beta, you would need to upgrade both of them if you want to upgrade either of them.  If they are on different machines, there is not a problem.

2) When installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta on top of Visual Studio 2008, VS user settings are reset to default VS settings.  This bug is caused by code originally put in place to reset settings when upgrading minor version of VS, for example from VS Beta1 to VS Beta2 so that VS would have the latest default profile settings.  VS does migrate settings from VS 2005 to VS 2008.  VS certainly should keep user settings when upgrading to a service pack, which will be fixed for SP1.

Please backup your VS settings before upgrading to VS 2008 SP1 Beta.

Before installing SP1 Beta1, use the "Export Settings" wizard (“Tools” menu, “Import and Export Settings…”) to save your current settings, then install SP1 Beta1, and then use the wizard to import your settings back into VS.

ReqSheet enables offline creation and editing of requirements.  The tool manages a simple, lightweight requirements hierarchy and can be synchronized with TFS.  The requirements "documents" can be emailed, shared via Sharepoint and more.  Along with their storyboarding product, Reqsheet creates a great solution for requirements elicitation with TFS.

Check out more at the stpSoft web site: http://www.stpsoft.co.uk/vsts/

Brian

Sorry for being a bit late to the game...  I should have posted yesterday but I've been drowning.  As you may already know, we released the Beta for 2008 SP1.  I'm eager to have you try it out and give us feedback.  You can find the list of new TFS features here.

I do, however, want you to keep in mind that it is a Beta and you shouldn't expect a completely seamless experience.  I installed the VSTS SP1 myself and it went pretty well.  The main thing I noticed was that I installed and it rebooted and then I had to install again (and reboot again) - the first install was .NET 3.5 SP1; the second was VSTS 2008 SP1.  After that, it ran great.

Before you install

It is imperative that you read the readme before you install.  It contains critical information about caveats for the Beta.

.NET 3.5 SP1 Readme - The .Net Framework update

VS2008 SP1 Readme - VS Pro or any of the VSTS role products.

VS Express Readme - All of the Express products.

Installing SP1 Beta

Visit this site for a great launching point to learn about, download and install SP1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx

The VS patch will patch the .NET Framework, all of the Team System Role SKUs and the stand-alone Team Explorer.

The Team Foundation Server update will patch a TFS server, proxy or build server.  If you also want to upgrade (it's optional) to .NET 3.5 Beta 1 on those "servers", then you will need to separately also install the .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta patch.

Giving feedback

We will be taking Beta feedback until May 30th.  There are a variety of ways for you to give it.  We look forward to hearing from you.

SP1 Forum - http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=2136&SiteID=1

SP1 Connect - https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio

‘Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Beta’ and .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta´

Installation issues - http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2008/05/09/visual-studio-and-net-log-collection-utility.aspx

This blog is the best source of up to date information on installation issues.

A couple of things that I've seen come up...

• Once you've installed it, you will need to make sure you "View installed updates" on Vista to see the SP1 installation in "Programs and Features".
• The Beta 1 client is fairly difficult to uninstall.  See the read me above for info.  The good news is that if you install it on your "real" machine, you don't really have to uninstall it.  The final release will install directly over top of the Beta.  The TFS server Beta 1, on the other hand, must be uninstalled before installing the final release, but fortunately it's pretty easy.
• There are some complexities around installing TFS with pre-release builds of SQL 2008.  Read this blog post if you want to try it.  This technique can actually be used even if you aren't using SQL 2008 but is required if you are installing a new TFS install against a SQL 2008 server.

Brian

I know licensing around Team System continues to be a pain point.  In an attempt to address issues with clarity and understanding, we've produced an updated whitepaper that includes all licensing updates for VSTS 2008.  Please let me know if you have feedback.

Brian

Today seems to be blogging day.  Here's post #3 of 4 or 5 that are coming today.  Sorry for the deluge but it's been a couple of weeks since I blogged.

I think we are finally nearing the end of the full scale roll out of TFS to the Developer Division.  Almost everyone working on the next version of VS/.NET are now on TFS.  There's some other projects that have not switched yet but I expect most will before too long.  The biggest sign of this continued growth is in # of Recent users (up 145).  That's 145 more regular users this month than last month.

The other number that staggering (at least to me) is the # of local copies.  There are over 2.2 BILLION rows in that table.  Wow!  That's a lot of data.  Last I checked, the DevDev TFS database had gotten to around 8 terra-bytes.

I've started including a new section in this report for Builds.  Lots of teams are now using TFS for continuous integration and other buddy build systems, making the numbers start to seem significant.

Here's the graphs to show trends.  A big part of why downloads are not continuing to grow is increased usage of proxies.  We have found that too many downloads can overwhelm the application tier and block other operations.  We started to hit those problems at around 100,000,000 downloads a week (but only during peak hours).  Soon we will be deploying a change that allows us to "force" clients to use a proxy.  This is a server setting that causes the client to use it Active Directory location to select the appropriate proxy.  At that point, the downloads will drop dramatically.

Users

• Recent users: 1,958 (up 145)
• Users with assigned work items: 3,726 (up 91)
• Version control users: 3,820 (up 140)

Work Items

• Work Items: 412,931 (up 24,819)
• Areas & Iterations: 10,084 (up 379)
• Work item versions: 3,455,704 (up 173,764)
• Attached files: 244,126 (up 11,853)
• Queries: 25,653 (up 1,733)

Version control

• Files: 269,782,247 (up 32,956,473)
• Folders: 64,235,613 (up 7,849,640)
• Total compressed file size: 2,217,966 MB (up 127,435 MB)
• Checkins: 435,933 (up 24,762)
• Shelvesets: 31,417 (up 3,424)
• Merge history: 651,803,197 (up 78,266,752)
• Pending changes: 24,219,035 (up 7,381,865)
• Workspaces: 8,921 (up 346)
• Local copies: 2,214,366,807 (was 2,004,549,728)

Builds

• Builds: 6,155 (up 532)

Commands (last 7 days)

• Work Item queries: 458,533 (up 81,627)
• Work Item updates: 38,428 (up 19,384)
• Work Item opens: 213,043 (up 104,217)
• Gets: 322,315 (up 73,578)
• Downloads: 97,058,031 (down 21,524,757)
• Checkins: 6,732 (up 1,014)
• Uploads: 110,702 (down 1,614)
• Shelves: 3,104 (down 3)

Brian

We get a reasonable amount of feedback from BizTalk users that would like a more seamless experience working with Team System and BizTalk.  The number one complaint that I hear is that building BizTalk with Team Build is very difficult.  The underlying reason for this is that BizTalk does not use msbuild for building their projects.

I've been working with the BizTalk team for the past several months to try to figure out how to fit this support in.  I'm very happy to say that I've just been informed that they will be getting it into the upcoming BizTalk Server 2006 R3.  I think this will be a nice improvement for all of you BizTalk/TFS users out there.  You can read more about the R3 release here: http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/04/23/biztalk-server-platform-updates.aspx.  Although this post doesn't mention the Team Build support specifically, I've been told it will be there.  Of course that goes with my usual caveat of "plans are always subject to change", but we'll keep working with them to help make sure we can deliver this great feature.

Now I'm off to talk to the SQL Server Reporting Services team to get them to commit to a release to add this support in :)  Those are the two I hear the most customer requests for.  If there are more that are important to you, let me know and I'll see what we can do.

Brian

Last week, we published another new spec on "Properties" for TFS.  This spec describes a new feature that allows you to associate properties with different artifacts in TFS.  The include Files/folders, shelvesets, labels, branches, Workspaces, pending changes, etc.  Ultimately, we hope to expand this to all artifacts in TFS.  This spec is still in draft form - in fact we just reviewed it internally on Friday and there was a lot of feedback to simplify some aspects of it.  We're very interested in your input as well.

To get you thinking about what this might be used for, here are some example scenarios...

• You might use the properties to store additional attributes of files.  For example, if you were using TFS on Unix, you might attach a property containing the file's Unix files attributes when you pend the changes so that you can restore them when you get the file.
• I'm hoping to use attributes on shelvesets as the basis for a future Power Tool that enables a nice code review experience.  Of course, you could beat us to it :)
• Properties on labels could be used to describe their purpose and allow filtering of them in UI to eliminate clutter.
• And more...

I suspect you'll be able to think of even more creative ways than I can of using properties.  Let us know what you think.  Remember the spec feedback forum is here.

Brian

The stream of new stuff coming out for VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 continues! - see my recent post on an update to the TFS Power Tools.  It is time for me to tell you about what is coming in TFS 2008 SP1.  The release of the Beta is very close (as always, don't ask me for a date but if you want to play with it when it comes out, start figuring out how you are going to find the time :)).

TFS 2008 SP1 is going to be another fantastic release.  In TFS 2005 SP1, we started the tradition of adding small, tactical features that address common customer requests or enable delivering new value out of band.  In TFS 2008 SP1, that practice has gone into overdrive and we are delivering a ton of great new stuff for you.  Keeping with the theory that an SP should always be better (more stable, faster, etc) than what came before it, we continue to focus on tactical "low risk" improvements that are primarily based on customer feedback.  We leave the big game changing, major new scenario features for our major releases.

I've blogged a bit about what is coming in Rosario (our next major release); you can read some of our Rosario specs and you can check out our CTPs but that's not the point of this blog post.  I'm going to start blogging more about Rosario in the next couple of months.  For now I have so much great stuff to tell you about TFS 2008 that I can't imagine bothering you much with stuff that still a good ways down the road.

In addition to a long list of bug fixes (which I plan to publish when we get closer to SP1 release), there is an amazing list of new features.  The new features in TFS 2008 SP1 include:

Version Control

• Add to Source Control - The Add to Source Control dialogs have been improved to make them easier to use and more scalable.  This include such simple things as adding a menu option to the context menu on the folder tree.  Also, the add experience has been turned into a wizard with the first page allowing you to select what you want to add and the second page making it easy to review what you are adding and filter out things that don't make sense (.pdb, .exe, etc.)

• Drag & Drop - We've added the ability to drag files/folders from Windows Explorer (and other file drop sources) into the Source Control Explorer to add them.  This ties in well with the new Add to Source Control experience.  We have not yet added the ability to drag from the Source Control Explorer yet but if that's something you want, say so and we'll see if we can get it in a future release.
• Version control of unbound files - One of my personal favorite new features...  Have you ever noticed that if you start typing in a version controlled file that is in an open solution, it auto-checks out and lets you keep typing?  If the file is not in a solution you get weird read-only behavior.  No longer!  We now treat all version controlled files equally whether they are in the open project/solution or not - providing auto checkout, diff, and all of the other version control behavior.  This makes it so much easier to work with version control when files outside the solution get loaded.
• Simpler working folder mappings - I suspect you'll know what I mean when I say the "Workspace" dialog is not one of the more easily understood parts of TFS.  We have now added abilities to the Source Control Explorer so that you rarely have to look at it.  You can now right click on folders in the Source Control Explorer and map working folders, cloak mapped folders or unmap working folders.  This is an easier and faster way to change where source is stored on your local hard drive.  To further simplify this, we have added a link to the path bar in the source control explorer to indicate that no mapping has been created for a folder and give you a 1 click way of setting it.
• Checkin date/time column - We've gotten quite a few requests for a check date/time column in the Source Control Explorer.  The feedback has been heard and now you have it.  Ultimately we'd like to make the whole columnar display configurable but alas... that's for another day.

• Local Path is now a link -   The Local Path header in Source Control Explorer is now a link that allows you to easily open Windows Explorer to the folder.
• Editable source location - The field that displays the server folder in the Source Control Explorer is now editable to make is easy to change to a new folder by just typing rather than navigating the tree view.
• Download files to a stream - If you build TFS extensions, this can be a handy addition.  Instead of having download files to temp files and then read them back in and manage deleting the temp files, you can download directly in memory and process the contents.  I'm expecting some cool new Power Tools later this summer that will take advantage of this new feature.

Work Item Tracking

• Ribbon support for Office 2007 - Instead of the uglier "add-in" experience that you now have with TFS 2008 & Office 2007, we now have clean and easy to use ribbon support for all relevant TFS operations.

• Easily email work items - We've added support to Team Explorer to make it very easy to email a work item or a list of work items.  If you have Team System Web Access, these emails will contain links to it, giving recipients a great ability to explore related work items.

TFS Build

• Easily locate TFSBuild.proj file - We added a right click menu item on the build definition in Team Explorer to take you to the TFSBuild.proj file in the Source Control Explorer.
• Conditionalize builds on the trigger - We added the ability for a build script to detect how it was triggered so that you can have slightly different behaviors for CI, sheduled, manual, etc builds.
• Detect test result - Rather than just failing the build, you can now detect the results of tests and conditionalize the build script on it.
• Dynamically created properties - Dynamically created properties in the build can now be passed to solutions/projects.
• Reduce build log noise - Eliminate "noise" created by project to project references.  Now you will only get 1 message about each.
• Query build definitions across Team Projects - Added an object model API for querying build definitions across Team Projects.

Visual SourceSafe migration tool (vssconverter.exe)

We have received a significant number of reports of problems trying to the the vssconverter to move from VSS to TFS.  In TFS 2008 SP1, we invested very heavily in testing and bug fixing.  In addition to the few high level things I've called out here, we fixed many dozens of bugs - many of which were reported by customers.  We have also invested heavily in testing - collecting more than 20 customer VSS databases and making sure that the vssconverter handles them all seamlessly.  I strongly recommend you use this new vssconverter over any previous version.  I believe you will have a significantly better experience.  If you still have problems, we most certainly want to know about them.

• Elimination of namespace conflicts - Properly convert files where a file was deleted and a different file was subsequently renamed to the same name (and some similar scenarios).  This is the #1 most common issue that people have had with the current converter.
• Automatic solution rebinding - When converting a source tree, automatically change the binding in all solution and project files to bind to TFS rather than SourceSafe.  This eliminates a time consuming post conversion manual process.
• Correction of timestamp issues - Many VSS databases contain timestamp inconsistencies (due to VSS using a client timestamp rather than a server one).  The converter now adjusts for this problem rather than getting confused.
• Improved logging - The conversion logging messages are now more clear and provide more information necessary to diagnose what is wrong when the conversion process needs attention.

Other areas

• SQL 2008 support - When we released TFS 2008, it was compatible with SQL 2008 builds that were available at that time.  Unfortunately, in the interim, there have been changes to SQL 2008 that broke TFS.  TFS 2008 SP1 includes the necessary changes to work with final SQL 2008 builds.  There will be a few "special" steps for installing TFS 2008 SP1 with SQL 2008.  Keep your eyes peeled for a newer post that gives the details of installing TFS 2008 SP1 with SQL 2008.
• Team System Web Access links - If you've ever clicked on the link next to a filename in a checkin notification mail, then you know the feeling of disappointment :)  Unfortunately it doesn't give you the information you want.  With TFS 2008 SP1, if you have Team System Web Access installed, those links are now alive.  You can directly view the changes using the TSWA diff viewer.  This isn't the only place we've added the links - we've added TSWA links to many of the notification mails (work item changed, etc).  Overall a much nicer experience for people who don't live and die in Team Explorer.
• # of projects per sever - Constraints on the number of projects per server have been written about quite a bit.  In TFS 2008 SP1, we have made some important improvements.  To refresh your memory, the primary issue is that the size of the cache that the TFS client downloads is proportional to the number of projects on the server.  This cache can get very large (10s of MBs) and slow things down to the point that usability is affected.  The changes we have made for SP1 include:
• Only download metadata for projects a user has access to.  By only granting access to the projects a user needs, it will dramatically reduce the size of the metadata they download.
• Implemented cache compaction to remove some stale data from the cache that is no longer used.  We have seen 30% or better improvements from this in some circumstances.
• Improved the speed of the Connect To TFS experience when there are a large number of projects in the list.  We saw about an 80X improvement on one of our internal servers.
• Create Team Projects with a script - This has been a popular request since we first released TFS 2005.  Now you can do it.  You still must have Team Explorer installed on any client you want to use to create Team Projects, however, it can be scripted.  There is a new Visual Studio API (I'll blog a sample in the near future) to do this or, even more easily, you can use a new command "tfpt createteamproject" in the March 2008 release of the TFS Power tools to do this easily from the command line or a batch file.

Performance & Scale

• Improved syncing identities from Active Directory - Our tests show syncing a group with 200,000 users dropped from 69 minutes to about 10 minutes.  This can significantly reduce background overhead on a system with lots of users.
• Improved checkin concurrency - Checkins are globally serialized - meaning 2 checkins (overlapping or not) must be processed in order and the second must wait on the first to complete.  In SP1, we were able to both improve the overall speed of checkin and reduce the blocking.  The blocking period is now only about 1/3rd of the checkin time.
• tf branch /checkin - Creating new branches when they are large (ours are about 1,000,000 files) can be very time consuming.  We have created an option for creating a branch that is much faster.  tf branch /checkin creates the branch without first pending the changes and requiring a subsequent checkin operation.  The result is about a 10X improvement in branch creation speed.
• Online index rebuilding - If you use SQL Enterprise with TFS, TFS will now rebuild indexes online allowing for less "downtime" for maintenance.  If you use SQL Standard (which comes with TFS), then you will still get offline index rebuilding and your TFS server will not be responsive during weekly maintenance jobs.  If your TFS database is small, it doesn't really matter but as it gets into the terra-bytes, online index rebuilds become a must.
• Team build support for very large checkins - In TFS 2008 and previous versions, a very large checkin (hundreds of thousands of files) would trigger an out of memory error in TFS Build and prevent CI builds from triggering.  The out of memory issue has been fixed in SP1 and all checkins should properly trigger builds.
• Faster security manager - We found an O(N^2) algorithm in the security manager for version control and have replaced it with an O(N) algorithm.  It will help version control performance across the board.  We found it on large Get operations (getting hundreds of thousands of files).  The change reduced the security manager time from 5-6 minutes to a few seconds.  The end result is that those gets were about twice as fast.
• tf get /remap - Kind of a complicated feature but dang handy if you need it.  This is a new option on tf get that is intended to be used when you want to switch your workspace from one branch to another in the same code base.  You first change the workspace mapping and then issue a tf get /remap.  Because a large percentage of the files in two related branches are frequently identical, this command optimizes for that.  Rather than downloading all the content, it will only download the things that are different between the two branches.  I can reduce the get of a very large workspace from 10's of minutes to a few seconds.
• Much, much more... - This is just a taste of the performance improvements we've made.  As always, each release includes a roll up of performance improvements we've made for our own internal dogfooding of TFS.  This release is no different.  There are dozens of additional fixes that we've made to improve performance.  If your installation is very large, you should notice nice responsiveness improvements across the board.

As you can see, we've packed a lot of value into this service pack.  I hope all of this makes your days just a little bit better.  As always, we'd love to hear your feedback.  At this point, the service pack is just about done, so I can't take a bunch of new feature requests and get them into this release but we can sure put them on the list for the next one.  I'll let you know as soon as the Beta is available and I'm eager to hear you feedback.

Brian

We've gotten a lot of feedback over the past year that our online content is really valuable but that it is a big problem that it is not translated for countries where English is not a commonly spoken/learned language.  Japan is, perhaps, one of the best examples.  We are trying some experments in this area and one of them is translating my blog into Japanese.  Among them is translating my blog to Japanese.

Here's a link if you speak Japanese: http://blogs.msdn.com/tfsjpn/default.aspx

We haven't quite figured out what we are going to do about comments yet - since I, unfortunately, do not speak Japanese.  We are also looking at the possibility of doing a version in Chinese.  We'll assess how these and other experiments go and see what works best.  Based on that we'll expand into other offerings.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Brian

We've heard some reports from people who are upgrading to the Mar 2008 Power Tools that they have had problems uninstalling the Dec 2007 Power Tools (which you must do first).  They get "error 1001" - a very useful error message a must admit.  It makes me wonder what the other 1000 errors are :)

Anyway, working with a few customers, we have determined the cause of the problem - and the work around is easy.

Solution – Repair then Uninstall

Go to Control Panel, Add Remove Programs (or Programs and Features if you run Vista).

Select the Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2007 Power Tools – December 2007 release

Press Change

Select the Repair option.  Press next.  Complete the repair.

After the above is finished, Attempt the uninstall (i.e. press the remove button)

Install the March 2008 Power Tools

Hopefully this will help you if you hit this problem.  Let me know if you find other issues.

Thanks,

Brian

It's been a while since I did a post of overall TFS adoption at Microsoft and it seems like it would be a good time to do so.  More and more teams onboard every month and usage within teams continues to deepen.  I post details of the Developer Adoption every month, and this post with give you a (less detailed) picture of what it looks like across the whole company.

A simple way to look at this is the number of active TFS users.  Here's a trend of total active TFS users across the company:

Here's a graph of trends, broken down by major group:

This report comes from the operations team.  You'll notice the DevDiv number doesn't quite match my monthly DevDiv posting.  I don't actually know why and haven't had time to investigate.  I have some suspicions.  DevDiv actually has 2 TFS servers (one used way more than the other).  I only report on the "big" server - and my numbers show 1,800 - 1,900.  I suspect that they are reporting on both and they may or may not be eliminating duplicates across the two servers.  So, they may not be an exact count of people but I think they are pretty close.

Another way to look at it is by the number of Team Projects that are under way:

Work item tracking remains the most extensively used component.  Here's some stats that indicate degree of usage of a few of the TFS features:

As you can see the ramp for people using Team Build has really hit a knee and is taking off - more than half of the total builds have been in the last month.  Some of this may be an artifact of people purging older builds.  I don't believe we have any way to count deleted builds.

Anyway, hopefully this gives you a decent high level picture of how adoption is going here.  We're very happy with it.  We are in talks with pretty much all of the major divisions about how they are going to be expanding usage in their next version

Brian

We added/updated several Rosario specifications this week.  For those of you on the "bleeding edge", this is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor and provide feedback early in the development process.  You can provide any feedback you have on our feedback forum here: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDNWorkShop/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1981&SiteID=64

The updates include:

Add to Source Control - Minor updates to the existing specification

Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management - A new spec that covers some of the architectural changes we are making to improve scale and managability in a large enterprise environment.  These features are also key to enabling multi-tenent hosting of TFS.

Organize team queries and my queries using a folder hierarchy - A new spec on how you can organize your work item queries into heirarchical folders.

Brian

We've just released a new version of the TFS Power Tools.  This new Power Tool release will work only with the VS/Team Explorer 2008 client (but against either a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server).  If you haven't taken the time to upgrade yet, I highly recommend it - you are missing out on lots of great new value we are delivering.

Although this release is not quite as big as the record setting December '07 Power Tools release, it's packed with great stuff.  It's got something for almost everyone but the largest portion will probably be most useful to TFS administrators.  We know TFS administrators have been hurting and we are working hard to make their lives easy.

There are actually 2 downloads for this Power Tools release.  You can read below for details as to why.

TFS 2008 March '08 Power Tools

64-bit TFS 2008 Sharepoint extensions installer

In addition to the new features listed, we have fixed quite a few Power Tools bugs.  I don't have a complete list to share but I'm told there are some very important fixes that you will want if you use the Power Tools.  The new features include:

• Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls - This has been, perhaps, the most commonly requested enhancement.  Anyone using custom work item controls knows that it has meant going back to editing XML for any work item type changes.  This new feature allows you to continue to use the GUI editor when using custom controls.
• TFSServerManager client - Long ago, I posted screen shots of the TFSServerManager tool we've written to monitor what's going on in a TFS server.  The tool has finally made it into the Power Tools.  The accompanying TFSServerMonitor that provides availability and performance counter data has not yet made it but we hope to get that into a future release.  None-the-less, TFSServerManager alone, provide some great capability, including the ability to produce reports like the dogfood statistics posts that I do for our DevDiv server every month.
• TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008 - In addition to various rule improvements and bug fixes, we have updated the TFS Best Practices Analyzer to work on Windows Server 2008.  This enables this valuable tool to help trouble shoot issues on all supported operating systems while providing the minimal amount of "noise" and inappropriate warnings.
• Work Item Template improvements - We've made a ton of usability improvements to the existing work item template Power Tool features.  If you haven't tried out this feature yet, I strongly recommend it.  It's a great way to pre-populate template bug reports (and other types of work items) with much of the required data and reduce the overhead of entering lots of similar kinds of bug reports.  The biggest improvements include:
  • Work item templates have moved from a separate tool window to a new node in the Team Explorer window (including support for organizing them in folder, cut/copy/paste, drag & drop, etc.

• Editing work item templates now happens in a tool window in the document well rather than the somewhat odd looking scrollable modal dialog that it used to use.  This includes full document integration - toolbar support, dirty state, etc.
• With the integration into tool windows, we were able to significantly simplify the menu structure and reduce clutter.
• Scriptable Team Project creation - Oh my has this one been on the back log for a while.  It was a very common request right after we release TFS 2005 and we've finally gotten around to doing something about it.  This Power Tools release includes a new tfpt command - "tfpt createteamproject" that can be used to create new Team Projects in scripts rather than having to use the GUI.  There are a few important caveats here though.  First, it will only work if you also have Team Explorer 2008 SP1 installed on the machine.  There is a new API in Team Explorer 2008 SP1 that enables this new Power Tool command line.  Team Explorer 2008 SP1? you say?  How do I get that?  Well, SP1 hasn't released yet and I haven't even blogged the new feature set in it yet.  I expect some developments in those departments shortly.  I hope to blog the feature set of TFS 2008 SP1 shortly and for the Beta release of TFS 2008 SP1 to follow soon after that.  Keep your eyes peeled and know that once you get TFS 2008 SP1, this Power Tool feature will light up and suddenly scripting Team Project creation will become practical.  Oh, an by the way, using Team Explorer 2008 SP1 and this Power Tool release, you can automate Team Project creation against both TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 servers.
• Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms - Due to an unfortunate oversight in TFS 2008, our WSS installation tool does not support 64-bit Sharepoint.  We are rectifying this oversight with this new release of the TFS Power Tools.  We now have a TFS WSS extensions installer that will work on 64-bit Sharepoint installations.  Because this will only be needed by a few administrators/operations personnel, we chose not to include it in the main Power Tools download but instead to make it a separate download that can be found here.
• Unshelve to a different branch - tfpt unshelve now supports a new option "tfpt unshelve /migrate" that will unshelve a shelveset to a different branch than it was originally authored in.  This provides a handy way to move pending changes from one branch to another without checking them in and merging and without having to do a bunch of manual work to figure out the common base version between the branches and work out the merge relationships.  A very handy addition that we use quite a lot internally.
• Improvements to tfpt review - We use tfpt review internally for managing code reviews and have gotten a bunch of feedback on how it could be better - particularly in performance of moving between the file changes.  We've made several improvements to make the experience better.
• Delete global lists in the work item tracking system - tfpt destroygl now allows you to delete global lists from the work item tracking system.  Previously there was no way to eliminate a global list once it had been created.  In the future, I hope to see this ability incorporated into the Process Template Editor, but for now, at least it is available.
• Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes - Bound Office documents (Excel spreadsheets and Project plans) include the TFS server name so that they can refresh their work item lists without prompting the user to connect to TFS.  Unfortunately, there has been no way to update the server name in the event that you rename your TFS server.  With the introduction of tfpt changedocurl, you can now update the server name, port number, etc in bound Office documents.
• Performance improvements in tfpt online - I'm not sure how many people this will be a big deal for, but it's been a big complaint internally where we have 10's or 100's of thousands of files in an average workspace.  If you have large workspaces and you use tfpt online, you will likely notice that it now puts less load on the server and takes less time.

That's it but as you can see it's a long list and it's got something for almost everyone.  I really hope you enjoy it and, as always, please send me any feedback you have.  We are committed to continuing to deliver high demand improvements at every opportunity.  I mentioned TFS 2008 SP1 in this post briefly.  As I said, I'll be blogging about it soon and I really can't wait.  The list of improvements is HUGE - probably twice the size of this list.  Add that to the new version of Team System Web Access that's being previewed now (see my earlier post) and it's an exciting time for VSTS 2008 users.

Thanks,

Brian

The wildly popular Team Development guide with TFS that was produced by the Patterns and Practices team has now been translated in to Russian.  You can find the Russian translation here.

Brian

I just discovered one more in a long list of things that I missed while I was out.  Teamprise has released Teamprise 3.0.  The new release includes tons of great new features, including: Full Team Build support, Checkin policy support, folder compare and more...

You can read more about it on Martin's blog: http://www.woodwardweb.com/teamprise/000421.html.

Or check out the new Teamprise web site at: http://www.teamprise.com/

Brian

Team System is recognized for many of its strengths.  One area that I think people often don't grasp the power that Team System brings is in Requirements Management.  We don't currently have a product that we sell for the explicit purpose of requirements management but none-the-less can play a central role in a powerful requirements management solution.

Lori Lamkin has written an article on requirements management with Team System.  It includes an overview of the problems in requirements management, lists approaches to each phase, talks about what Team System brings to the table and where/which partner products can be used along with their strengths.

It makes for a good read if requirements is something that your development team could do better.

Brian

I meant to blog about this before I went on sabbatical, but you know how it goes - the best laid plans...

A couple of months ago OpenMake released support for TFS in their Meister cross platform build and deployment product.  This product integrates with TFS's Build capability to enable you to build & deploy applications that include Java, Unix and even zOS components in addition to Windows based ones.

You can see a brief 1.5 minute video highlighting the product or visit their web site to learn more.

Brian

We've been publishing hotfixes for general download for a year or so now.  Although it has been reasonably popular, it never took off (in terms of publishing or downloads) the way I had hoped.  Part of the problem, I believe, is that the advertising/download solution we had was not very conducive to finding what you want.  We hope that problem has now been fixed.

Developer Division hotfixes are now being published on the new MSDN Code Gallery site.  It gives us the ability to tag hot fixes with key words and for you to refine your search for what you want.  I'm hoping it will really boost the usefulness of the service.  I am also going to work on increasing the volume and frequency of publishing hotfixes.

The home page of the site looks like:

If you then click on the "Hotfix" link in the dark grey area to the middle right, you will see:

Which is a list of all available hotfixes, including links to the Knowledge Base (KB) articles that describe them.  Clicking on "Tags" in the filter area just above the results allows you to further refine the list.  For example, clicking on "tfs", yields:

Which lists all of the Team Foundation Server hotfixes that are available.

We are working now on getting all of the TFS 2008 hotfixes posted and I hope they will be available within the next 2 or 3 weeks.

Happy hunting,

Brian

Due to my sabbatical, I missed the March Dogfood statistics.  In my absence, adoption has continued apace.  The team has been very busy making sure the server is behaving well and applying fixes when it is not.

Looking at the graphs below, you can see that several of the statistics have really started to grow at dramatically higher rates in recent months - File downloads, Files, Workspaces.  In fact, the only reason you see file downloads decreasing is that we continue to move more high load users (like the build lab, checkin validation, etc) to use proxies for downloads rather than the main server.

We continue to drive improvements to handle the additional load.  Unfortunately, we've had to cut off their incorporation into TFS 2008 SP1.  Many many of the improvements made it, but at some point we had to draw a line and we did that a month or two ago.  The additional improvements will, of course, make it into the following TFS release.  However, I believe you'll find (if you also have a very large server) that the improvements that we've included in SP1 will result in some very nice performance improvements for you.

Here are the detailed numbers.  If you look at them closely, you will find that they don't match the difference between what I reported last time and this time.  That's because (although I didn't report it), I actually did take a snapshot a month or so ago and these differences are against that snapshot.

Users

• Recent users: 1,813 (up 116)
• Users with assigned work items: 3,635 (up 123)
• Version control users: 3,680 (up 226)

Work Items

• Work Items: 388,112 (up 20,245)
• Areas & Iterations: 9,705 (up 216)
• Work item versions: 3,281,940 (up 185,805)
• Attached files: 232,273 (up 10,325)
• Queries: 23,920 (up 1,287)

Version control

• Files: 236,825,774 (up 30,000,636)
• Folders: 56,385,973 (up 6,807,315)
• Total compressed file size: 2,090,531 MB (up 163,906 MB)
• Checkins: 411,171 (up 36,479)
• Shelvesets: 27,993 (up 5,320)
• Merge history: 573,536,445 (up 73,745,308)
• Pending changes: 16,837,170 (up 6,244,260)
• Workspaces: 8,575 (up 1,595)
• Local copies: 2,004,549,728 (up 539,146,465)

Commands (last 7 days)

• Work Item queries: 376,906 (up 133,484)
• Work Item updates: 19,044 (down 8,035)
• Work Item opens: 108,826 (up 46,398)
• Gets: 248,737 (down 412,995)
• Downloads: 118,582,788 (up 16,758,498)
• Checkins: 5,718 (up 489)
• Uploads: 112,316 (down 54,245)
• Shelves: 3,107 (up 962)

Thanks,

Brian

We continue in our effort to publish specs for features that are under development very early in the process so that we can incorporate your feedback before we are even done coding it.  We haven't published as many as I had hoped but we continue to emphasize the importance of it within the team and are starting to see some real momentum.  While I was out on sabbatical, 3 new specs were published.

Codename “TFS Bug Submission Portal” Power Tool for Team Foundation Server 2008 - This covers the new limited TFS access for users without CALs.  I just wrote a longer blog post about it announcing the availability of a CTP.

Send Mail from TFS - The spec for a new feature coming in TFS 2008 SP1 (more about that in the next week or two when I write a blog post about all the great stuff that's coming in SP1).

Core Linking Work Item Tracking - This spec covers the core enhancements to work item tracking that enables hierarchies, typed links and more coming in Rosario.  This underlying improvement is going to enable an amazing number of new scenarios.

Further, this week I am expecting to see 2 more specs published...

Query Folders - A feature for enabling you to organize your work item queries into a folder hierarchy.

Enterprise TFS Management - An overhaul of some of the TFS application architecture that is going to enable substantially greater deployment flexibility and manageability in the enterprise environment.

Keep your eyes peeled for the new specs and we look forward to your feedback on the ones we've already published if you haven't already given it.

Brian