26 April 2012

Team Foundation Service Status

If you are a regular user of the “preview” version of Microsoft’s new Team Foundation Service – a.k.a. “TFSPreview”, then you’re probably aware that the service is currently down for maintenance.  This maintenance outage may have come as a surprise to many of you (it did to me) because there is currently no built-in mechanism to notify users of planned outages.  I would suspect that something will be added in the future to ease this pain.  However, in the meantime, here are a few tips that I have seen over the past hour that you can use now to help keep up to date with TFSPreview maintenance.

11 April 2012

Team Foundation Service Whitepaper in Beta

Visual Studio 11 ALM Rangers Readiness Beta “Wave”The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have shipped another deliverable as part of the ALM Rangers Visual Studio 11 Readiness “Gig” Project – the Team Foundation Service Preview whitepaper.

If you have been following the various developments of Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 then you are already aware that Microsoft now offers a cloud-based solution for TFS – currently referred to as the Team Foundation Service Preview.  Many of the features that are currently available in the “on-premises” version of TFS are also available in the cloud-based version (conversely, there are also some features in the cloud-based version that do not exist in the on-premises version).  Rather than getting into the details of what’s included in the Team Foundation Service, I recommend checking out the newly release Team Foundation Service whitepaper (click here then click on the “ALM Rangers – Visual Studio Team Foundation Service.pdf” link).

The current table of contents include the following topics:

  • The Dogfooding Environment at a Glance
  • The good, the bad, and the ugly as experienced by ALM Rangers
    • Context
    • What is the ease of acquisition and deployment of Team Foundation Service?
    • How is a distributed work model with multiple companies or remote workers enabled?
    • How is "work from anywhere" enabled?
    • How are ongoing improvements delivered to Team Foundation Service?
    • How does Team Foundation Service handle Identity Management?
    • How should administration of Team Foundation Service be handled in the Enterprise?
    • Why should Team Foundation Service be positioned as a "Centralized Service Delivery" in the Enterprise?
    • When should you choose between Team Foundation Service and On-Premise Deployment of Team
    • Foundation Server?
  • References

If you have questions about the Team Foundation Service then this document proves to be a great source of information.

For more information, refer to this post on the Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog.

04 April 2012

TFS 11 Power Tools Beta Released

A beta release of the TFS 11 Power Tools has been released.  This release can run side-by-side with the TFS 2010 Power Tools (with some caveats – see below).

The features included with this release are:

TFS 11 Power Tools

  • Team Foundation Power Tool Command Line (tfpt.exe)
  • Team Explorer Enhancements
  • Windows Shell Extensions (*note: depending on which versions of the TFS Power Tools you install (e.g. TFS 2010 or TFS 11 Beta) the last one installed wins – i.e. you can’t have Windows Shell Extensions for both versions)
  • Process Template Editor
  • Test Attachment Cleaner
  • Best Practices Analyzer
  • TFS PowerShell Commands

Build Extensions – provides the ability to execute Ant or Maven 2 builds from Team Foundation Server 11 Beta and publish the results of the build along with any associated JUnit test results back to Team Foundation Server.

MSSCCI (32-bit) & MSSCCI (64-bit) - enables integrated use of Team Foundation Version Control with products that do not support Team Explorer integration.

There are a few known issues which Brian Harry has documented in this blog post.