Dapper DevOps

Back to back, to back, to back!

Great news for this year: I have been awarded for the 4th time in a row (here’s the title ) as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM. So you can expect a new, great...

02 Jan 2013

Review – Professional Visual Studio 2012

This heavy, 1054 pages book is the reference for every developer approaching Visual Studio 2012. If the review would be just one sentence long, this would be my review but it isn’t, so here’s the...

15 Dec 2012

Workspace Templates: a useful helper for non-VS users

If you have a user which doesn’t use Visual Studio (reasons may vary: designers, stakeholders, analysts, etc.) but uses the Windows Explorer Integration brought you by the Team Foundation Server Power Tools, this user must...

11 Dec 2012

Batched Gated Check-ins

A subtle new feature in Team Build 2012 is the possibility of batching the gated check-ins workflow, which enables you to “sum up” your check-ins and let the Team Build elaborate them together. It’s available...

03 Dec 2012

Review - Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012: Adopting Agile Software Practices: From Backlog to Continuous Feedback

This book, wrote by Sam Guckenheimer (Product Owner for the Visual Studio ALM family) and Neno Loje (Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM) is a complete, five star journey into the world of Agile Software...

23 Nov 2012

Candidate Changes with Local Workspaces

As with the Local Workspaces we can work offline in a easier way than before, there’s another really useful side-effect of this: the so-called Candidate Changes. When we add a file or delete something outside...

16 Nov 2012

Visual SourceSafe Upgrade to Team Foundation Server, the new way

Some minutes ago the Visual SourceSafe tool for migration to Team Foundation Server and Team Foundation Service. It is already available inside your Team Foundation Administration Console or from the Visual Studio Gallery. Beware, it...

09 Nov 2012

Review - Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

If you have to start approaching the Application Lifecycle Management, this is going to be your bible. Written by Mickey Gousset (Visual Studio ALM MVP), Brian Keller (Microsoft Senior Developer Evangelist ), Martin Woodward (Microsoft...

02 Nov 2012

Upgrading Team Foundation 2012 Express

It can happen that you have to migrate from a TFS Express installation (reasons can be various) to a full featured one. It’s pretty easy: as the Team Foundation Server database is the same regardless...

01 Nov 2012

Team Foundation Service is RTM!

Today at //Build Microsoft unveiled what a lot of people was waiting for: the RTM of Team Foundation Service. You can reach it at http://tfs.visualstudio.com/, despite the old http://tfspreview.com will still work for some time....

31 Oct 2012

Marking transactions on Team Foundation Server’s databases

As we know, in the Team Foundation Server PowerTools for the 2010 version and built-in in the 2012 version we have a Backup&Restore utility which is added to the Administration console for…backup purposes J But...

22 Oct 2012

Rollback Changeset in Team Foundation Server: the time machine

It may happen you have the need of rolling back a previous changeset (due to various reasons). As far as today, you could do it with Get Latest Version – compare – Merge&Fix. Fairly rough,...

10 Oct 2012

Random questions I got on Team Foundation Service

During the last months I went back and forth demoing Team Foundation Service, and several questions came up. Despite there’s a FAQ page out there, it seems people don’t read corporate pages , so I...

03 Oct 2012

Team Alerts as an automated notification tool

Communication among team members is the main pillar for the modern ALM, no excuses. There are many ways of getting all the team members involved, but sometimes a communication needs to be asynchronous and, more...

21 Sep 2012

Understanding user loads with the Team Members tab

With the new wave of Visual Studio tooling for Project Management, I’ve been asked for a quick way of understanding commitment of the developers as a high level overview. There are lots of ways doing...

12 Sep 2012

Remote UAC with Standard Environment and Workgroup Machines

As using workgroup machines in Standard Environment is a borderline scenario, there are some issues and stuff to care about, like the careful usage of shadow accounts or the right management of Remote UAC. In...

02 Sep 2012

Beware of the Microsoft Account!

The introduction of the Microsoft Account as an identification method on Windows 8 is great, it enables several scenarios in a seamless way and it makes life easy for users. But there’s a downside over...

20 Aug 2012

Tailor-made Visual Studio 2012 installations (aka unattended, the new way)

Up to Visual Studio 2010 the unattended installation was made up of many steps, making a journey into a .ini file… With Visual Studio 2012, the new experience is pretty faster, cleaner and easier. The...

17 Aug 2012

Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server step by step

As I tweeted some weeks ago, the Visual SourceSafe 2005 support expired July 10th, 2012. So it is no more a supported solution from Microsoft.If you have some Visual SourceSafe still lying around your datacentre,...

03 Aug 2012

Team Build Nuggets: Automatic publishing of Web Applications with Team Build

As we’ve seen in the previous post, we can automate the creation of a deployment package to automate deployment of web applications. What we’ve seen until now is just the beginning: in this post we’re...

21 Jul 2012

Team Build Nuggets: XCopy Deployment

What’s needed to perform an XCopy Deployment with Team Build? Just that as a MSBuild Argument: /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:DeployTarget=PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder /p:_PackageTempRootDir=\\<server>\folder

16 Jul 2012

Team Build Nuggets: Deployment Package

A great feature inside Team Build is the capability of creating deployment packages from the server in order to automatically deploy the application to the target server. It’s really easy, you only have to create...

12 Jul 2012

Baseless Merge 101

A Baseless Merge is a not-that-known feature of the TFS’ Version Control System. It’s a merge made with two branches of a root with no relationship between them. For instance, two parallel ‘release’ branches. The...

06 Jul 2012

How to instrument an application with PreEmptive Analytics for Team Foundation Server

As I previously posted, in this release we have a powerful instrumentation tool for our exceptions: PreEmptive Analytics. Given the required server side configuration, here’s what’s needed on the client side: Open up Dotfuscator: ...

11 Jun 2012

Forward Compatibility Patch for Visual Studio 2008 to support TFS 2012 and Service is out!

For who is still using Visual Studio 2008 and wants to connect to Team Foundation Server 2012 or Team Foundation Service, the GDR patch has just been released! Here’s the download. Matteo

06 Jun 2012

Configure PreEmptive Analytics for Team Foundation Server 11

As I previously talked about, PreEmptive included an instrumentation and analysis tool for Team Foundation Server. After you install it, it’s needed a little bit of configuration. So you have to open the PreEmptive Analytics...

30 May 2012

Step by step configuration of the Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Feature Pack

This post is aimed at helping who has never configured the Team Foundation Server and Project Server integration First of all: do not use NT AUTHORITY\Network Service as a service account. After this sanity check,...

14 May 2012

How to run local Web and Performance tests with Visual Studio 11

In Visual Studio 2010 to run Web Tests or Performance Tests you were editing locally, you had to run them from the Test menu, telling Visual Studio itself to pick up the local.testsettings file. In...

05 May 2012

Team Foundation Server upgrade of April 27th: what changed?

April 27th Team Foundation Service got upgraded to a new version. As you know (and if not, I’m going to explain now ), Team Foundation Service doesn’t have a RTM – GDR – Service Pack...

03 May 2012

Standard Environment in Visual Studio ALM 11 using Workgroup machines

As I mentioned before, there’s the possibility of creating Standard Environments using Workgroup-joined machines and not just domain-joined machines. All you need is to use Shadow Accounts (ie. “DOMAIN\account” and “account” on the local machine,...

02 May 2012

Creating Standard Environments in Visual Studio ALM 11

What’s new in Visual Studio Team Lab Management 11? Well, IMHO the most important new feature is the Standard Environments capability. As far as today, if you wanted to use VSTLM you were forced to...

28 Apr 2012

Run alternative unit test frameworks from Visual Studio 11

With Visual Studio 11 the whole set of testing features has been trashed out and remodelled upon a completely new shape. If until Visual Studio 2010 you had as a default and mandatory choice MSTest...

16 Apr 2012

Excluding actions on certain software using Microsoft Test Manager

The possibility of doing Exploratory Testing (as I mentioned in my last post) includes some times where you have to use certain tools without being recorded by the MTM recorder. You can configure selective exclusion...

10 Apr 2012

Tips for Exploratory Testing in a real world consultancy scenario

As the name itself suggests, Exploratory Testing is made to explore. One of the best scenarios you can use it is in the early phase of a consultancy. Imagine it, you’ve being called to fix...

05 Apr 2012

How to get IntelliTrace in production for Windows Applications in Visual Studio 11

As we saw in the last post, we can get IntelliTrace logs from web applications. But this is possible for Windows Applications, too! Locate the IntelliTrace application under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\IntelliTrace\11.0.0. Then...

28 Mar 2012