TFS » A Developer's Life

13 Apr 2009

Deleting Work Items in TFS – a UI

Team System, TFS, Utilities

If you work with Work Items in VSTS/Team Foundation Server then you’ve probably had the desire to delete a work item at some point. Sounds easy enough, right? Just right-click a work item and select… wait, there’s no Delete option? That’s right – the Team Foundation Client does not include any functionality for deleting work items from TFS. Although it’s a tad inconvenient, you can delete work items from TFS by installing the Team Foundation Server Power Tools (October 2008 release or greater). Of the many features available as part of the power tools, there is a command called destroywi…

09 Apr 2009

VSTS 2010 Feature List

Team System, Visual Studio

Brian Harry has started a series of posts detailing the new features in Visual Studio Team System 2010. In his first post, he lists the high-level features along with associated blogs that provide further details. He will be drilling into more detail with future posts but this is a great list if you’re just wanting an idea of what’s new in VSTS 2010.

06 Apr 2009

Omaha Team System User Group

Team System, User Group, Utilities

Due to the recent birth of our new son, Zachary, I am somewhat late in getting this post on-line. Although I am a little behind in getting this posted, I still want to get the word out about our last presentation at the Omaha Team System User Group. On March 24th, Farm Credit Services of America (FCSA) once again hosted the user group meeting. Many thanks go out to Russ Wagner for his continued help and for accepting the position as co-leader of the Omaha Team System User Group! This meeting’s topic was presented by Jeremy Novak, a developer at…

06 Mar 2009

TFS Admin Tool v.Next

TFS, Utilities

For those of us who use the Team Foundation Server Administration Tool, we know how much of a time saver it can be. If you have not used the TFS Admin Tool, hosted on CodePlex, here’s a quick description: The TFS Admin Tool allows a TFS administrator to quickly add users to all three platforms utilized by Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, and SQL Reporting Services, all through one common interface. The tool also allows administrators to change the current permissions on any of the three tiers, identify any errors, and view all of the users and their…

11 Feb 2009

Team System Live

Team System

I came across a (relatively) new site yesterday called Team System Live. This site is built on the Ning platform and was put together by Chris Tullier. It provides a great view into various live events related to Visual Studio Team System. There are various event types, including: In Person events such as workshops and user group meetings On-line events hosted by Microsoft Office Live Meeting On-line chats You can add your own events or you can search for existing events by keyword or browse based on event type or date. Once you locate an event of interest, you can…

09 Feb 2009

VS 2008 Project Template for TFS Utilities

TFS, Visual Studio

If you’re like me and create a lot of simple, “one-off” TFS utilities, you’ve probably followed steps similar to these multiple times: Create a new “Windows Forms” (or “Console”) project in Visual Studio 2008. Add various TFS assembly references which can range anywhere between one or a dozen references. Add some “using” statements to your code. Finally, start coding the utility. Apparently, Neno Loje (a fellow Team System MVP) has done this a time or two as well and decided to create a Visual Studio 2008 Project Template to alleviate some of the repetitive tasks. After installing the template, you…

31 Dec 2008

Get Files Associated with a Build

Code Snippet, TFS API

One of the greatest features of Team Foundation Server is it's extensibility via the TFS Object Model. A short while back I received a question asking how to retrieve a list of all files included in all the changesets associated with a build. The intent (of the person asking the question) was to deploy only those files that had been modified in one of the changesets. The following code example is what I came up with. I can't say it's the only way, or even the most efficient way, to achieve the desired result, but it's at least one way…

26 Nov 2008

How To: Skip Actions When Queuing a Build

How To:, Team Build, TFS

One of the tasks we commonly build into our Team Build scripts is the ability to run FitNesse tests along with other tests (such as unit tests). If any of the tests fail, we do not deploy the product for user acceptance testing. The advantage to this approach is that we find out relatively quickly if we have "broke" the build if we have failing tests. The down side to this is two-fold: 1) the build takes longer to run (not that big of an issue in our case) and 2) Sometimes we refactor code that should break the FitNesse…

26 Nov 2008

Omaha Team System User Group

TFS, User Group

After having to postpone the session from September due to scheduling conflicts we had a great turnout for the Omaha Team System User Group meeting last week. The speaker for our November meeting was Russ Wagner, an Enterprise Applications Architect at Farm Credit Services of America. After having some tasty pizza and enjoying a little socializing, Russ presented on the TFS command line utilities and TFS Power Tools related to Team Foundation Server. The presentation went very well (despite some pre-demonstration glitches) and proved to be very informative. Although I've had the opportunity to use the majority of the command…

27 Oct 2008

VSTS 2010 + .NET Framework 4.0 CTP

CTP, Team System, Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) has been made available for download (as of 26 Oct 2008). You can get the latest bits here. It is about a 7.5 GB download so be prepared for it to take a little while, especially since it was just released. There is a ton of new functionality in VSTS 2010, far too much to enumerate in this post. However, you can check this previous post of mine as a starting point for getting more details. Download VSTS 2010 .NET 4.0 CTP

Category: TFS