A Developer's Life

For anyone using FitNesse you may have the need (or just plain desire) to run your FitNesse tests from within your Team Build scripts.  This is a need that we have on a project I'm currently working on so I investigated the various options for implementing the tests within our automated build process. In the end, I ended up creating a custom build task that allows you to run FitNesse tests as part of your build.  The build task currently supports FitNesse but will also support tsqlunit tests (another testing framework we use) in the near future. I've placed the…

One of the nicest features of the TFS SharePoint site (in my opinion) is the ability to display various reports on the portal's home page.  We currently display a build report as well as a defect report.  To do this, I've always used the default Page Viewer web part and manually set the URL to the desired report. However, today I noticed a post from Jeff Atwood describing a different approach.  He explains how to install the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services web parts (which already exist on your TFS server - they just need to be setup). There are…

A couple of months ago I posted about a utility I happed across that synchronizes Team Foundation Server bugs with Mercury's Quality Center/Test Director product.  At that time I hadn't yet had the opportunity to try the utility out.  This past week I finally planned some time into my iteration to setup the utility and try it out. Our development team currently uses Visual Studio Team System for development whereas our testers are currently using Mercury Quality Center to track defects.  On past projects I've actually went through the trouble of manually synchronizing defects in both systems (luckily we didn't…

For anyone managing multiple build types within Team Foundation Server's Team Build service, you've probably come to realize there are several shortcomings in v1.0.  For example, there's nothing in the IDE that lets you stop a running build for delete completed builds. Although I've built a couple of utilities on my own to alleviate some of these issues there is now a project on CodePlex which handles these issues very nicely (and looks way cooler than anything I've written for these tasks :-) - TFSBuildManager. TFSBuildManager has the following features: Start, stop a build Change build/s quality Delete, backup build/s…

For anyone using the AssemblyInfoTask custom build task you may have noticed that it does not work (using default settings) when performing a build in the new year (2007). This is due to a restriction within Microsoft's version number scheme (i.e. it uses 16 bit numbers).The AssemblyInfoTask home page suggests a work around by modifying the Microsoft.VersionNumber.targets file (on the build server) and changing all occurrences (there's two of them) of "yyMMdd" to "01MMdd". This will work for the remainder of the year, at which point you'll need to change the format to "02MMdd" for 2008.If you are like most…

I'm currently working in a shop that tracks defects in Quality Center but I would like for our development team to be able to work with TFS defects directly from their Visual Studio IDE. I started to work on an in-house solution for synchronizing defects, however, I recently found out about a utility for synchronizing bug/defect items between Mercury Quality Center and Team Foundation Server. Although I haven't used it yet (I'll be trying it out over the next week or so) it looks to be very promising.Here is a quick rundown of how it works:For every selected defect for…

The SRL Team has released a new utility to help with the management of Team Foundation Server permissions.? TFS Permission Manager 1.0 has allows you to work with all aspects of TFS-related permissions and includes the following capabilities: Add or remove TFS group memberships, Reporting Services role memberships and SharePoint role memberships Set Server- and Project-level permissions Set Area Path and Source Control permissions Create new TFS users with permissions identical to those of an existing user Save user permissions as a template and use it later to create new or update existing users If you have the responsibility?of managing?permissions…