What's New in TFS 2008

I just completed my presentation on the new features of TFS 2008 at this year's Tulsa TechFest.  It was a relatively small session held in one of the classrooms here at the OSU campus which allowed me to more easily address questions during the presentation.  The topic I presented on is called What's New in TFS 2008.  Although the presentations run roughly 75 minutes, I had to skip over a couple of my demos because there are so many new features in TFS 2008.  It was easy to tell that I'm not the only one excited about some of the new features :-)  If I had to pick my top 5 features in TFS, they would have to be:

1. Continuous Integration - although there are 3rd party/open source implementations available for TFS 2005 now, they don't have the same, clean integration that's present in TFS 2008.
2. Build Retention Policies - finally, I won't have to worry about running out of space on the "drop" server because there are 2,000 old builds sitting around collecting dust.  Anyone that's ever had a build fail due to lack of disk space (which is not stated in the build failure log) will appreciate (or, love) this feature!
3. Better Build Support - specifically, the ability to store the TFSBuild.proj file in any folder.  This greatly enhances branching options.
4. Queued Builds - the ability to queue builds is great.  I know longer have to wait for my CI build to complete before I can start the test build that pushes the updates to the test machines.
5. Performance Improvements - there are tons of other enhancements and improvements throughout TFS 2008 but there are also a lot of performance improvements as well.  Anything that allows my builds to complete a little bit sooner is much welcomed.

I could probably list a couple dozen other features that I really like in addition to those above but I have to stop somewhere :-)

You can download the slides here if you're interested:

• PowerPoint 2007 Format
• PDF Format

TFS 2008 Features in TFS 2005

There are a lot of new features in TFS 2008.  So many in fact, it's difficult to list them all at once.  I will, however, do my best to cover as many new features as I can during this year's Tulsa TechFest when I present on What's New in TFS 2008.  There are a lot of new features that have been integrated into TFS 2008 that can also be had today in TFS 2005.  Some of these are listed below...

Continuous Integration - there are several 3rd party solutions for implementing continuous integration in TFS 2005.  These include:

• A Microsoft implementation - this is a web-service based implementation that allows you to associate a Team Project with a specific Build Type to be called any time something is checked into version control.  I've seen several variations of this implementation available on the web.
• TeamCI by Notion Solutions - this is a free CI tool offered by Notion Solutions.
• TFSBuildLab - this is an open source project on Microsoft's CodePlex site.  This TFS utility offers more than just CI capabilities.

TFSBuildLab - along with the continuous integration capabilities listed above, TFSBuildLab has many other features:

• Retention policies - can be based on Build Status or Build Quality.  You can also specify the number of builds to keep or the number of days to keep them.
• Tray notifications - receive build and check-in notifications (via "toast" messages)
• Build queuing - provides a mechanism for queuing builds.
• Build scheduling - provides a UI for scheduling builds.

"Listless" Unit Tests - TFS 2008 has the ability to specify which unit tests to run (during a build) based upon a file mask rather than being forced to select a list of tests.  This approach lets you easily run all unit tests within an assembly or set of assemblies (for example) without ever having to manage lists of tests for the build.  Buck Hodges has a great post explaining an implementation for TFS 2005.  Trust me, once you start specifying your unit tests in your build using this approach, you'll never go back to test lists again :-)

"Broken Build" Check-in Policy - TFS 2008 has a new check-in policy called Builds.  When something is checked into version control this policy will check to see if any related builds are currently in a "broke" state;  If so, the policy will fail.  The idea is to not let developers keep checking in code when the build is just going to fail anyway.  Clark Sell has created a Build Status check-in policy for TFS which gives you this functionality now, in TFS 2005.

BuildStep Task - If you've ever wanted to add your own custom text in the build report (the view you get in Visual Studio while watching an active build run through the various build steps) then you're in luck.  In TFS 2008, there's a new build task called the BuildStep task that does just this.  You can also get this functionality in TFS 2005 with the TeamBuildTask posted by Aaron Hallberg.

Incremental Builds - incremental builds are supported within TFS 2008.  TFS 2005 build scripts can be configured to run incremental builds with a little work.  There's a "how to" article on MSDN that explains the steps to run incremental builds in TFS 2005.

There are undoubtedly other features that can be made available for TFS 2005 but this is a good start.

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 - Released

As of a short while ago, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 was released.  This also includes the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2.  Silverlight 1.0 RC is expected to be released within the next couple of days.

Also, these releases (Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2, as well as Silverlight 1.0 RC) come with a "go live" license that allows you to start development now and not have to worry about a supported upgrade path when the final versions ship later this year.

Here's a list of the installation disc images that can be downloaded:

Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition Beta 2

Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition Beta 2

Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite Beta 2

Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Foundation Server Beta 2

Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Test Load Agent Beta 2

MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

Also, there are a couple of VPC images that can be downloaded as well:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite Beta 2 VPC

Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite & Team Foundation Server Beta 2 VPC

The Visual Studio Express Editions can be downloaded from here.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 can be downloaded from here.

You can read more about these releases from Soma, Rob, Brian, and Scott.  I'm sure there will be lots to write about over the next few weeks as everyone gets into the nuts-and-bolts of Beta 2.

Microsoft's Largest Launch - Ever!

Microsoft announces today (July 10th) that Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 (formerly code-named "Orcas") will be officially launched together on February 27th, 2008.  Although it appears that Visual Studio 2008 is still set for release later this year, I have to say I'm a little surprised (although not too much) by the release date.  I had the impression these tools would be available a little sooner than this since the 2007 PDC in Los Angeles was canceled with this message:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch...

At any rate, I will definitely be ready to start using Visual Studio 2008 as soon as it's available.  And, since Visual Studio 2008 is planned to be released along with a "go-live" license, I may start using it a lot sooner than that.

You can read more here and here.

Gearing Up for HDC 2007

It's that time of year again here in the heartland - preparation for the fourth consecutive Heartland Developers Conference.  Last year's conference went very well (Philip and Joe did a great job putting it all together) with a lot of great presentations and this year is looking to be even better.  A new track, “Manage It”, has been added this year which will focus on providing cutting edge content on topics like virtualization, technology driven project management, strategic process management, empowerment tools, and other topics that will help you to manage the development and implementation of your development projects.

Although the speaker schedule has not yet been updated on the HDC web site, I understand that the two keynote speakers will be Ron Jacobs and Scott Guthrie.  If you have an interest in architecture and/or ASP.NET/AJAX, you will definitely want to check out these guys if you're able to make it to the conference.

Last year, I had the privilege to give a presentation on automating the build process with TFS.  This year, one of my co-workers (Ron Yenko) will be presenting on Clustering SQL Server 2005 for High Availability.  It promises to be a great talk.

Hope to see you there.

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Includes "Go-Live" License

I noticed in a blog post by Scott Guthrie that Visual Studio 2008 (formerly known as "Orcas") will include a "go-live" license allowing it to be put into production use with a supported upgrade path to subsequent releases.

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 will ship later this summer, and the Beta 2 release will support a go-live license for those who want to put applications into production using the new features immediately.

Also, just in case you missed it, "Orcas" is now officially known as Visual Studio 2008 and the related .NET Framework is known as .NET Framework 3.5.  Visual Studio 2008 has "multi-targeting" support which allows you to configure your Visual Studio 2008 projects to use the .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5.

Read the post here.

A Quick eScrum Review

As many of you have probably noticed, Microsoft has released a new product called eScrum.  This product adds a scrum-based process template to your Team Foundation Server along with related functionality (e.g. product management, backlog items, tasks, sprint management, and reports) allowing you to manage various parts of the agile software development process.

eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help.

I installed eScrum this morning and gave it a short run-through.  Here are some of my initial thoughts:

• Three words - "Complete the MSI"!  Although the eScrum product is downloaded as an MSI package, there are still quite a few manual steps that you have to complete before you're able to use the new template.  This includes downloading and/or installing the .NET Framework 2.0 (no biggy here), ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0, AJAX Control Toolkit, and the Anti Cross-Site Scripting Library 1.5.  You must also manually install the SharePoint templates as well as upload the process template to TFS.  These are tasks that would be better off automated.  There are also some file-based permissions that need to be configured - this would be better off automated as well.
• You have to manually edit an XML file to include your eScrum Team Projects within the eScrum portal.  Shouldn't the portal be able to deduce which Team Projects were created with the eScrum process template?  If so, then this should happen automatically.
• There are two "read me" documents that you must go through in order to setup & configure eScrum.  If the MSI is not going to automate the various tasks for you,then please combine these into a single document.
• An "administration" screen would be welcomed - if you could add projects and group members from within the web site, it would keep you from having to switch back and forth between Internet Explorer and Team Explorer.
• Minor issue - if I leave the product owner off when I attempt to save a new product, it tells me that the "Assigned to" field is empty.  I'm not sure if this can be changed or not, and it's really not all that important - just something I noticed.

Some tips:

• Follow the "read me" documents step-by-step.  If you do this then you shouldn't have too many problems getting setup.
• When you download the Anti Cross-Site Scripting Library, be sure you download version 1.5.
• Be sure to follow the instructions for redirecting the AJAX Control Toolkit version to the version downloaded unless you happen to have version 1.0.10301.0 laying around.  eScrum was compiled against a version older than what is currently available for download so, unless you have access to the old version, you'll need to map the versions within the configuration file.
• Make sure you edit the two XML files (as noted in the "read me" file) that configure which TFS server/port you're using as well as the name of the TFS eScrum-based Team Project(s) you've created and want to have access to via the web portal.
• Once you've created the eScrum Team Project(s), you'll need to configure the Team Project security and add members to the "Contributors" group in order for them to show up in the portal as project members.
• Once you install eScrum, help is available via the link on the web site.

All in all, I like what I see at first glance.  My favorite part of it all is the simplicity of the UI.  It seems that you have exactly what you need but nothing else.  We haven't had a chance to use it in practice yet so I'll be presenting it to my team over the next few days to see if there is any interest in trying it out (along with/instead of what we're currently using).

Downloads:

• eScrum download
• .NET Framework 2.0
• ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0
• AJAX Control Toolkit
• Anti Cross-Site Scripting Library 1.5

Other References:

• eScrum 1.0 - Somasegar's WebLog - some interesting feedback from viewers.
• An attempt at working with eScrum - a not-so-glowing review of eScrum.  The reviewer gave up on the installation prior to getting everything to work.
• eScrum Update: ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Version Conflicts - Rob Caron - an explanation of how to map the correct version number for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.
• MSDN Power Tools Forum - the eScrum team has been monitoring this forum for eScrum-related questions.  Post any questions you may have about eScrum here.
• eScrum 1.0 and TFS Orcas - instructions for configuring eScrum to work with TFS "Orcas".
• A glimpse at Microsoft's internal development tools - a little insight about the tools that Microsoft's development teams use.

Updated Team Foundation Server Roadmap for "Orcas"

Brian Harry has just published a new post detailing the future "Orcas" release of Team Foundation Server. The post is fairly detailed and he attempts to point out what features are new as well as what will be in the Beta 1 release vs. the Beta 2 release.

The features marked as new include:

• TFS Best Practices Analyzer - A tool that can be run against your TFS server that will help diagnose configuration errors and tuning possibilities.
• VSTS Web Access - There's been much written about this already but the new Web Access product from devBiz will be released as a Power Tool in the next 60-90 days.
• Support for MOSS 2007.
• Official testing and support for more configurations - This includes clustering, mirroring, log shipping, Virtual machine deployment, and more.
• Scheduled builds - You can schedule builds to happen at specified times.
• Improved build agent communication - We replaced .NET binary remoting with WCF web services, simplifying some configuration and security aspects.
• Ability to run GUI tests as part of a build - Automated builds used to run tests in such a way as to prevent access to a GUI desktop.
• New checkin policy for broken CI builds - Preventing checkin while the CI build is broken.
• Offine improvements (Beta 2) - We've signficantly improved the experience going offline and integrated the tfpt online capability into the IDE for going back online.
• Extranet support for the TFS Proxy - allowing you to access a local TFS proxy with a different set of credentials than the TFS server.
• Command line help - You can now type "tf command /help" and get a console dump of the usage of that command. This is much more convenient than always being launched into the richer GUI hypertext help when you just want to remember what the options for a command are. You can still launch the GUI help by running "tf msdn". You can get a console dump of available commands by just typing "tf help".
• Source Control Explorer refresh improvements - This includes less redrawing and reloading but even more important it enables updates based on changes made in other instances of TeamExploror or the command line. That's right, if you checkout a file from the command line, any instances of TeamExplorer you have running on the same machine will automatically refresh.
• Query builder usability improvements - Drop down filtering based on current project, better MRU lists, column drag & drop, shift-click mouse based multi-column sorting, etc.
• Attachments improvements - Save button, drag & drop for adding an attachment, multi-select for attaching files.
• Tooltips on field names contain the field name used for querying.
• Server side support for deleting work items & work item types (Beta 2) - We didn't have time to do client UI support for it but we plan to release a Power Tool that will take advantage of the new server side feature.

The above list is only what has been flagged as "new" (some of which won't be available until beta 2). See Brian's original post for a complete list of all features.

New Orcas Features

Eric Lee has a nice post on some of the new features found in the current Orcas release. There is some really nice stuff coming out with Orcas, especially in the area of Team Foundation Server. Some of these features include:

• Code Metrics - view various metrics about your source code.
• Annotation View for Files under Version Control - lets you see who changed what & when?
• Team Foundation Server Build Definition Editor - quit messing around in all that XML!
• Build Retention Policy - automatically remove build files from your drop location.
• Continuous Builds - finally! :-)
• Build Queues - lets you queue up builds.
• Folder Differencing - allows you to compare everything within folders.
• Runtime Control of a Performance Session - control your performance session as it runs.
• Query View in Performance Reports - construct queries to sort through your performance data.
• Integration with Work Item Tracking - right-click to directly create a work item within the Performance Explorer.
• Performance Report Comparison - compares two performance files.

These improvements alone make for a nice upgrade (in my opinion) but these don't even include the new advancements made in the new .NET Framework.

Scott Guthrie has also posted on some of the new web development features found in the current Orcas release. Looks like some really nice features for richer HTML/CSS development, better data querying (via LINQ), etc.. Take a look at Scott's presentation slidedeck for more information.

The Orcas VPCs can be downloaded from here:

• Team Suite Orcas (March 2007 CTP) VPC
• TFS Orcas (March 2007 CTP) VPC