April 18, 2010
My video session (1 hour and 10 minutes) from Techdays 2010 in Belgium was pushed online at Channel 9!
This session will provide some insightful and practical guidance around branching and merging with Team Foundation Server. Setting up a specific version control structure for a new Team Project and defining the appropriate Branching strategy go hand-in-hand and need to be addressed before development starts. We will look into different scenarios how to support parallel development and how the new branching visualization features in TFS 2010 will help you to understand the big picture. In addition this session will cover guidelines on how to include a versioning strategy in your Team Builds to synchronize build numbers and assembly version numbers.
Slides were already dropped at the download section. Let me know if you would have comments/feedback on the session!
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Posted by pietergheysens
April 11, 2010
Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 enables teams to accelerate setup/tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for test execution and build automation. It extends build automation by automating virtual machine provisioning, build deployment and build verification in an integrated manner. It also allows testers to file rich bugs with links to environment checkpoints that developers can use to recreate complex environments, effectively reducing wasted time and resources in your development and test lifecycle.
A week ago at my main customer SD Worx in Antwerp, I managed to install a full-blown Team Foundation Server 2010 (RC), including Visual Studio Lab Management (RC) in an isolated environment.
I really got spoilt and got two physical servers at my disposal with each 20GB of RAM. This is the current configuration:
- Physical Server 1 (Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V):
- TFS2010AT_A: Application Tier TFS2010 (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 4GB RAM)
- TFS2010AT_B: Application Tier TFS2010 (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 4GB RAM)
- TFS2010DT: Data Tier TFS2010 (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 4GB RAM)
- Physical Server 2 (Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V):
- VS2010: Client with VS2010 Ultimate (Windows XP Pro with SP3 – 3GB RAM)
- TFSBUILD2010_A: Build Server (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2GB RAM)
- TFSBUILD2010_B: Build Server (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2GB RAM)
- TESTVM: Virtual Environment for testing Lab Management (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2GB RAM)
Note that the Team Foundation Server 2010 is setup with Network Load Balancing (NLB) for TFS services. I also should setup NLB for Reporting Services and WSS on both AT servers. SQL Reporting Services is installed on the application tier while SQL Analysis Services is installed on the data tier. One Team Project Collection is created with one MSF Agile Team Project. A Build Controller for the Team Project Collection is setup on Build Server A that manages a Build Agent on Build Server A and another Build Agent on Build Server B.
The second physical server will also serve as the HyperVHost machine, the VmmMachine and LibraryMachine for Visual Studio Lab Management.
This setup should give the opportunity for a small workgroup to further test the benefits of the entire Team Foundation Server 2010 environment. In total I must have spent about 4 days in installing and configuring this setup. I did follow the guidelines on the Visual Studio Lab Management Blog where the team posted a series on Getting Started with Lab Management.
I was really happy with the fact that the installation/configuration of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the other more IT Pro related stuff was pretty straightforward. More information on Lab Management can also be found at MSDN.
Next step is to schedule some internal workshops with the team to kick-off all the testing on the platform. Pretty excited to see this evolve!
I also want to thank the Lab Management Product Team for their support and follow-up of this installation at my client. To be continued!
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Posted by pietergheysens
April 1, 2010
Today I got renewed as a Team System MVP. Sweet!
Dear Pieter Gheysens,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Team System technical communities during the past year.
Looking forward to another very interesting “Team System” year with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 just around the corner! The release of Visual Studio 2010 will probably also be the time that the “Team System” moniker will disappear in the MVP title. I’m still not sure what the new title will be like: Team Foundation Server MVP? ALM MVP? Visual Studio MVP? Visual Studio ALM MVP?
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Posted by pietergheysens
March 3, 2010
Upgrading from Beta 2 to RC has really become a nice experience. I just upgraded also my Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 on my home computer (Windows 7) to RC. Just a screenshot to show you the wizard page that upgrades the available Team Project Collections.
Be sure to download the Upgrade Guide on the blog of Bryan Krieger to proceed with your upgrade to RC!
After the uprgrade process, the version seems to be already RTM?!
Also the TFS Build configuration wizard seems to be smart enough to keep/upgrade existing resources from Beta 2.
While upgrading my full-blown Team Foundation Server 2010 to RC on Windows Server 2008 R2, I must admit that I got an issue while upgrading the Team Project Collections. The wizard apparently got stuck due to some issue with the TFS application pool that wasn’t able to startup correctly. Force a rerun of the job in the Team Foundation Administration Console if you would be confronted with this issue!
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Posted by pietergheysens
February 14, 2010
Last week I delivered for Microsoft Belgium a full day technical seminar on testing with Visual Studio 2010. More than 20 people showed up and the attendees were an interesting mix of dedicated testers with none or little knowledge of the Team Foundation Server platform and some developer oriented profiles with little knowledge in the testing area.
While preparing and delivering this course I became even more convinced that the testing offering with Visual Studio 2010 really rocks. Some specific testing features (manual testing with action recording, IntelliTrace, Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Test, …) will be hard to miss once you get to use them in practice. Testers and developers will certainly be able to work more closely together to reduce the time it takes to find and fix software defects … and that’s what it’s all about in writing quality software!
All my demos did also work fine on the RC release of Visual Studio 2010, so I was pretty happy that I decided to prepare a RC image to use for the course.
I definitely need to blog about some of the cool collaboration stuff between development and testing teams. Note to self: free up some time!
Slidedeck is available at the download section.
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Posted by pietergheysens
January 27, 2010
Today I delivered an evening session on Application Lifecycle Management with VS2010 for the Visual Studio User Group in Belgium.
35 people showed up at SD Worx in Antwerp.
During one hour and 30 minutes I managed to give a brief introduction to the product features of the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010. In the first part I covered some slides and did a live basic installation of TFS2010 on Windows 7. In the second part I demoed some of the cool features of Visual Studio 2010:
- Team Foundation Administration Console
- Attaching Team Project Collections
- Branch Visualization features in Version Control
- Team Builds 2010 (Gated Check-In)
- Running manual test cases in Test & Lab Manager
- Creating a coded UI test from action recordings
- Architecture Explorer
The slides are available for download!
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Posted by pietergheysens
October 27, 2009
Wow! This is great! Tonight I just wanted to find out if and how it would work …
This is what I did with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and TFS 2010 Basic on my Win7 laptop:
- created a new Team Project
- added a new solution with a C# Library Project to the Team Project
- added a default Team Build to build the C# Library Project
- added a new solution with a C# WPF Project to the Team Project
- referenced the library assembly (file reference to dll) into the C# WPF Project and called a method on a class in that assembly
- set a breakpoint on that line and hit F5 to start/debug the WPF application
- pressed F11 (Step Into) when breakpoint was hit
Guess what?! Yes, Visual Studio 2010 was immediately stepping into the source file of the C# Library Project! Sweet!
I remember that it took me some time to get this working for TFS2008!
When you create a new Build Definition with TFS2010, the Index Sources option is set to true by default and this will make sure that source indexing is part of the build.
I took a peek into the DefaultTemplate.xaml file in the BuildProcessTemplates folder and found out that the Index Sources and Publish activity is indeed completely baked in! I love it already!
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Posted by pietergheysens
October 20, 2009
Since yesterday, MSDN subscribers are able to download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. I’m really excited about this release! Lots of important improvements in different areas of software development practices. I’m looking forward to further test and evaluate this release …
Today I did install already a Hyper-V image with a full blown Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2. Installation was absolutely flawless! First I installed IIS 7.0 and SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2. After that I was able to start the setup wizard of Team Foundation Server 2010 that’s now split into an installation part and a configuration part. The first part only copies the required files to the server while the second part takes care of the configuration. I did choose for the Standard Single Server wizard which guided me towards an easy and understandable configuration of the different TFS components. Thank you guys for keeping it simple! Other wizards are provided for more complex scenarios.
What I extremely like is the TFS Administration Console that pops up after closing the configuration wizard! It gives you a nice overview of what’s installed and you can control the project collections, build controllers, service accounts, … A lot of stuff that was managed via the command line in previous versions of Team Foundation Server. Good stuff! This Administration Console will probably evolve even more in the future.
You can start it now manually via Start > Programs (I do remember that with Beta 1 it was a snap-in for Microsoft Management Console).
So, that leaves me to install Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 for starting up a first development project. Note that Team Explorer is now part of the Visual Studio client edition and doesn’t need to be installed separately. Every Visual Studio edition will have a Team Explorer to connect to a Team Foundation Server. Very good!
You might have noticed that Team System did not come up once in this post up till now. I need to recover from the first shock, but the Team System moniker will eventually disappear. Back to the Visual Studio brand! I do not want to go deeper into this holy discussion but I assume there might be good reasons to take this drastic decision. In the end the decrease of different Visual Studio editions should make it more clear for all type of stakeholders. Agree or not … we will have to live with it! The decision has been made!
- VS 2010 Professional
- VS 2010 Premium
- VS 2010 Ultimate
Read more about the different editions here. The Ultimate Edition will contain *everything*, including IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger) and the Test and Lab Manager which won’t be part of the Premium edition.
There’s also an interesting limited offer for existing MSDN subscribers.
Let’s have some fun! In the coming days I will also try out a TFS Basic installation on a Windows 7 OS …
3 Comments | Installation & Configuration of TFS, Uncategorized | Tagged: TFS2010 | Permalink
Posted by pietergheysens
September 3, 2009
Recently (in TFS2008) I was stuck with the fact that I could not split up the permission to create/modify builds and the permission to create/modify build agents. In certain enterprise environments it might be necessary to revoke the right from development teams to create/modify build agents. Build agents may be for instance controlled centrally by an operations team that manages all build servers. In TFS2008 both tasks belong to the “Administer a buid” permission.
The good news is that TFS2010 will offer a lot more fine-grained permission sets! You will now have the possibility to set permissions on the Team Project Collection, on the Team Project, on the Build Definition level and on the Version Control repository!
- Team Project Collection
- Administer shelved changes
- Administer test controllers
- Administer warehouse
- Administer workspaces
- Alter trace settings
- Create a workspace
- Create new projects
- Delete a team project
- Delete team project collection
- Edit collection-level information
- Make requests on behalf of others
- Manage build resources
- Manage process template
- Manage work-item link types
- Trigger events
- Use build resources
- View build resources
- View collection-level information
- View system synchronization information
- Team Project
- Administer test environments
- Create test runs
- Create team project
- Delete test runs
- Edit project-level information
- View project-level information
- View test runs
- Build Definition
- View Builds
- Edit build quality
- Retain indefinitely
- Delete builds
- Manage build qualities
- Destroy builds
- Update build information
- Queue builds
- Manage build queue
- Stop builds
- View build definition
- Edit build definition
- Delete build definition
- Override check-in validation by build
- Version Control
- Read
- Check Out
- Check In
- Label
- Lock
- Revise other users’ changes
- Unlock other users’ changes
- Undo other users’ changes
- Administer labels
- Manage permissions
- Check-in other users’ changes
- Merge
- Manage branch
Great! There are a few permission that are new and that I certainly want to look into a bit deeper … but now let’s go back to my problem in TFS2008 and how to fix it in TFS2010. Right clicking the Team Project Collection brings me to the permissions on the Project Collection level.
The permission to Manage build resources allows people to create and modify build controllers and agents.
Right clicking Builds brings you to the permissions on the build definition level.
The permission to Edit build definition allows people to create and modify new build defnitions.
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Posted by pietergheysens
July 27, 2009
During my holidays I finally got some time to configure my new Dell Latitude E6400 laptop (4GB RAM, 128GB Solid State Hard Disk).
I have setup a dual boot with Windows 7 (really nice and fast install experience!) and Windows Server 2008. In the Windows Server 2008 operating system, Hyper-V is used to manage different virtual machines. For the moment I’ve created already two virtual machines :
- Team Foundation Server 2008 (workgroup edition)
- Team Foundation Server 2010 (Beta 1)
Instead of using a prepared TFS2008 virtual machine, I’ve decided to install and configure Team Foundation Server 2008 from scratch because I wanted to experience the difference(s) later with the installation procedure of Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1. I have installed TFS2008 a few times in the past but it stays a pretty cautious task. The one and only rule is to stick to the latest version of the TFS2008 installation guide. This is a list of the software that got installed already on the TFS2008 “All-Up” virtual image (app + data tier) :
After that it was finally time to put my hands on the Beta 1 bits of Team Foundation Server 2010. Installation guidelines for TFS2010 can be found here and some more helpful instructions here.
It’s clear from the start that the TFS Team put a lot of attention to the installation process. Installation is now separated from the actual configuration of the Team Foundation Server. In the first phase the software is copied to the server and some basic registration takes place. After this you get the option to configure TFS in a new configuration wizard where you can choose between a default and a custom configuration. The benefit of this new separated installation process is that the configuration phase can be completed one piece at a time without ever rolling back the first phase. I didn’t take screenshots during the installation process, but you can find most of the screenshots in this blogpost of Brian Harry. For sure, it’s a big improvement and I feel more in control during the setup.
More TFS2010 news to come!
Other interesting impressions :
- Solid State rocks!
- The Windows 7 experience is great as well! No big issues so far … it feels good! Also the ability to mount .vhd files comes in handy.
- My laptop has also a built-in eSATA port and I’m still looking for an external hard drive with an eSATA interface for extra storage. Any suggestions? What about storing virtual images on external drives? What type of external drives should I look for?
- 14.1″ for my laptop screen has been the right choice
- My IT Pro knowledge (Windows Server 2008 features/roles, Hyper-V, virtual networks, …) got a good upgrade during my holidays. What would I do without a connection to the Internet to set this all up. I also found a very good article on turning a Windows Server operating system into a workstation (link via Cameron Skinner).
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Posted by pietergheysens
