15 December 2006

Visual Studio 2005/TFS Service Pack 1 Released

As announced on Soma's blog, Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 and Team Foundation Server has been released.
This Service Pack addresses a range of issues that were found through customer and partner feedback as well as our own internal testing. Many of these issues were reported by you and I thank you for taking the time to report them to us. The release also adds a number of customer requested functionality and enhancements to some of the most common development scenarios to Visual Studio that I think you’ll find interesting and valuable.

You can find the full details here.

07 December 2006

TFS Bug Item Synchronizer 1.1 for Mercury Quality Center

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:

  1. For every selected defect for synchronization in TestDirector/Quality Center, it creates a matching bug item in TFS (with a link to the original defect).
  2. For every selected bug item in TFS, it creates a matching defect in TestDirector/Quality Center.
  3. For every defect updated in TestDirector/Quality Center, it updates the matching bug item in TFS.
  4. For every update in TFS, it updates the matching defect in TestDirector/Quality Center accordingly.
  5. It also offers the possibility of linking one TFS bug item to many TestDirector/Quality Center defects (inside the same project or in different projects) and update all related TestDirector/Quality Center defects when the TFS bug is updated.

It doesn't support attachments at this time but I'm told this capability is coming soon (i.e. possibly next week). I'll post my experiences once I've had a chance to work with it for a little while.

Click here for more information or click here for pricing.