Langleyben Leon

Team System Licensing

Team Foundation Server RC on its way

Team Foundation Server beta3 (refresh) Advantures - Team Project Name

Hi all,
After a month of hiking in China without any thoughts about ASP.NET, Team System etc., I am back.
Just this morning I finished TFS Beta3 refresh installation. Surprisingly it took only two hours, including MS-SQL Developer Edition setup and Team Explorer setup. So, again, here are first impressions. Project cleanup problem remains unfixed.
Just to remind you, after Team Project creation failure, project names remains taken and you can not use it any more. I wrote about it in my previous post. After some further investigation, this my check list to release dirty project name:

1. Database. You should rename entry with your project name in 4 tables (if such an entry exists):
   DB: TfsIntegration, Table: tbl_projects, Field: project_name
   DB: TfsVersionControl, Table: tbl_Version, Field: FullPath
   DB: TfsVersionControl, Table: tbl_Namespace, Field: FullPath
   DB: TfsWorkItemTracking, Table: TreeNodes, Field: Name
2. SharePoint Services. In some cases after project creation project site is not rolled back. Open Start>Settings>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>SharePoint Central Administration. Use option "Delete site collection" under "Virtual Server Configuration". Site URL should be http://sites//sites/.
3. Reporting Services. Cleanup remains of reports under Reporting Services Site (folder named the same as project and all its content). Browse to http:///Reports to do it.

Team Foundation Server beta3 Advantures (#2)

More TFS impressions:

• A lot of syntax changes everywhere. Database names, Element names in Process templates, Work Item definitions, Built in group names are renamed.
• Project delete utility still not functioning properly. It claims for successful project removal, but project name remains taken.
• As I wrote earlier, Team Project creation failure locks project name and prevent using it in the future. I found very ugly, but effective way to workaround it: change project name in two places in TFS database. To do it, open SQL Server client on TFS data layer, in database tfsintegration locate table tbl_projects. Change locked project_name (for example MyProject to Failed1. In database tfsworkitemtracking locate table TreeNodes rename your project name (Name field). Note that this method do not perform any cleanup, it leaves garbage in database. It is useful only to release locked project name for additional use.
• Sometimes invalid workitem type passed validation successfully. We have workitem which used "[Global]\Namespace Administrators" group to define field constraint. In beta3 group was renamed into "Team Foundation Administrators". WorkItem validation succeeds but actual import failed with very un-descriptive error message. We resolved this only with help of Aliaksei Baturytski from Microsoft. I hope next version of utilities will provide better error reporting.

Team Foundation Server beta3 is up and running!

After long, but pretty straight-forward installation it's done.

First impressions:

• Team System Client refused to be installed on Win2K SP4. I hope it is just my build; otherwise we will have a huge problem.
• There is a lot of syntax changes in Project Template. Most of them seam to be logical and reasonable, but make me to do a lot of manual changes. I hope those will be documented, so somebody will come up with some kind of converter (say XSLT ). I'll try to publish list of changes, I've encounter later.
• One bug we hope will be gone a long time ago: There is some cleanup/rollback problem, after project creation failure project name remains taken, and you can not use it any more. I will try to use project remove utility in the morning. It was not functional in beta2, hopefully it behaves better now.

It is a small step, but I'll keep you posted.

Team System Community Portal is Alive!

Several Microsoft RDs, MVPs, and others involved in the VSTS online community have recently launched the first community site dedicated to Visual Studio 2005 Team System. You can find there VSTS Tutorials, Videos, forums and a lot more. The site is young, don't pay to much attention to simple design, and enjoy the content.

Great work guys!

Visual Studio 2005 Team System Suite June CTP

Visual Studio 2005 Team System Suite June CTP along with Team Foundation Server and VS Professional  is available now for MSDN Subscribers. Couple of important points about this build:

1. It supports double server installation mode only
2. It doesn't support Go-Live License
3. It has improved documentation, a lot of bugs are fixed
4. It suppose to be less stable than beta2

Read more from Rob Caron's post.

Team System SCC Provider for VB6, VC6 and Everett

Microsoft announced at TechEd that they will write a SCC provider to allow VB6, VC6 an Visual Studio 2003 (Everett) access Hatteras (Team Foundation Version Control). I think it is a great thing for organizations that can not move all their development platforms overnight to VS2005. You will be surprised to find out how many ongoing VB6 projects I know.

Way to go! And don't disappoint me on this, I am waiting for it.

Available Controls for Team System Work Item fields

If you are looking for a complete list of controls available for use on Work Item form (not all of them documented in extensibility kit docs), here it goes:

ExtendedComboBox
FieldControl
DateTimeControl
HtmlFieldControl
LinksControl
AttachmentsControl
TFStructureControl
WorkItemLogControl

Thanks to Naren Datha for information.

And one more insight from Naren: ExtendedComboBox and FieldControl are actually the same. ExtendedComboBox kept for backward compatibility only.

Team System Work Item Field names

1. Work item name can not contain underscore or other not alpha-numeric characters. Spaces are allowed. Just spent some nice time replacing underscores in Work Item type fields migrated from ClearQuest. CQConverter migration tool did not consider it a problem.
   
2. Work item name should be unique. It is probably very logical decision, wich encourage naming consistency. The only problem for now is that I keep bumping into field names predefined by Microsoft (in namespaces like Microsoft.VSTS.Common for example). There is partial list of predefined fields in System namespace in extensibility kit documentation. As far as I know, fields from Microsoft.X namespaces are not documented yet.
   

Team System Portal Error: "Unable to locate control: ctl00oReportCell"

Scheduling build in Team System beta 2

Team System 2005 Beta 2 Extensibility Kit

For those who are already working with VSTS 2005 beta 2 and interested in customization, previous version of Extensibility Kit (1204 CTP) will no longer work with current version of Visual Studio.

New version is available here.