Martin Woodward has blogged that Teamprise v1.1 has now been released. One of the key new features in the maintenance release is the support for NTLM authentication. If you have not already seen Teamprise, make sure you download the 30–day eval version from their website and give it a try.

A big thank you to the QLD MSDN user group for making me feel welcome tonight. I enjoyed seeing Kyle Rosenthal talk about “A Developer’s Introduction to Microsoft Vista” before I presented a session on an “Introduction to Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers”.

As promised, here are the links I referred to during the presentation.

Josh Christie’s “Web Test Authoring and Debugging Techniques”
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/WTAuthDebug.asp
 
“Introducing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System Web Testing” by Mark Michaelis
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/vs05tmsyswebtst.asp
 
MSDN Forums – VSTS Testers (Ed Glas & Sean Lumley – you guys Rock!)
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=19&SiteID=1

For those of you wanting to drop Kyle an email about Vista, his email address is kyle@hynesite.biz and his blog can be found at http://spaces.msn.com/spidercon/

 

 

Last week I had an enquiry from a client asking me how to “Unlock the Add button in Source Control Explorer”. After asking a few questions I determined that the client had created a new team project (Procedures) and wanted to simply store a folder containing development related documents in Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC).  They had no intention of ever placing any VS solutions in the team project but just wanted to be able to version and store office documents and felt that their TFS server would be an ideal location. Over time they were going to use the work item tracking in TFS to record changes that needed to be made to the documents.

</TR></TABLE>

The Solution

The problem is related to the fact that no workspace mapping exists for the newly created $/Procedures folder. In the following walkthrough, I demonstrate the solution by adding a folder of office documents located at D:ProjectsProceduresDevelopment to TFVC in the $/Procedures branch.

To manually create a new mapping, follow these steps;

1. Open Visual Studio 2005 (or the Team Foundation Explorer if you are using that.)
2. Select File | Source Control | Workspaces…
3. Click your default workspace (normally PC name), then click the Edit button as shown
   

   

4. Click the next free line in the grid at the bottom of the dialog box, where it says “Click here to enter a new working folder”
5. In the Source Control Folder column, click the “…” button (1) and then add the Source Control folder name (Procedures)(2)  and click on the OK button (3)
   
   
   
6. In the Local Folder column, either type the path to the folder you wish to map to or browse to the folder using the “…” button. (Eg. D:ProjectsProcedures). Click the OK button.
   
   
   
7. You may be prompted to perform an update. If so, click the OK button.
   
   
   
8. Close the Manage Workspaces dialog box
9. If you look in the Source Control Explorer you should now see the Add button is available.
   
   
   
   To complete our walkthrough I have created a subfolder named Development that contains a couple of office documents to add to TFVC.
   
10. Click the Add button on the toolbar in the Source Control Explorer and click Add Folder.
11. Browse to D:ProjectsProceduresDevelopment folder and click OK. The contents of the folder will be displayed
12. Click on OK
</OL>

You should now be able to see the folder and the documents it contains shown as pending changes in the Source Control Explorer.



Checkin your pending changes and you’ll be ready to start updating and adding new files in no time

</p>

</p> The Problem The screenshot shows the $/Procedures folder which was created by the Project Creation Wizard (PCW) on the tfs server. Notice how the “Add” button on the toolbar is disabled. This is a common occurance and one that can be quite frustrating for users who are not familiar with TFS Workspaces.   </TD>

Jeff Atwood (Vertigo Software) has been busy with TFS and has posted an entry on his blog today on how to setup automatic email notifications when a work item is assigned. As he states, this is a common feature request and one that I have configured for several sites already. Jeff has conveniently packaged up the required web service in a zip file for download and he provides nice clear instructions on how to set it up.

Quick Note:  when you go to set this up and want to quickly test it… You won’t get an email for a WorkItem you assign to yourself. (Jeff does mention this)

Rob Caron has announced there is an updated version (v60711) of the Team Foundation Installation Guide now available (259kb). From his blog post, the new features include;

• Added a topic (System Requirements and Additional Client Software for Team Explorer) to help you determine the additional software you might want to install to use Team Foundation Server more effectively in your role. The new table includes where you can get the software.
• System requirements separated into topics that are in their respective installation sections.
• Added two entries to the troubleshooting topic (Troubleshooting Installation for Team Foundation Server):
• Unable to install Team Foundation Server due to IIS 5.0 isolation mode
  • Performance is slow during transfer of large amounts of data </UL></UL></p>

Rob Caron gives us the good news that a new CTP (CTP4) of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals has been released.

The CTP4 Release is now available for download from http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/1/681f2f35-365c-4b47-a1ac-044f9801efb0/TeamDataCTP4.exe

See Tom Murphy’s blog for more information for CTP4.

Martin Woodward posted an interesting article on his blog yesterday which details how you can determine the expiry date of a TFS Trial Edition installation. Like many others, I have installed the Trial edition for a number of clients while they waited for the full version to become orderable. A quick commandline will allow you to work out the date before which you really need to get the full license arranged and installed on your server.

Run the following command line and add 180 days to the date shown.

tf changeset 1 /server:http://servername:8080 /noprompt

See Martin’s full blog post for all the details and an explanation of how this works.

 

[Martin Woodward: TFS Top Tip #7 – Determine when TFS Trial Edition will expire]

I read a post from Howard van Rooijen this morning telling us that he has released an updated version of his TFS Notification Web Services template for VS2005. If you’re working with TFS and you want to write some custom extensions using the TFS notification web services, this template is a GREAT place to get started.

Some of the key changes in version 1.1 include support for the following events;

• CheckInEvent
• NodeCreatedEvent
• NodeRenamedEvent
• NodesDeletedEvent
• ProjectCreatedEvent
• ProjectDeletedEvent

[Read Howard’s blog post and download the template]

I just caught the news on Rob Caron’s blog that Microsoft have released an update to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider. This tool has been available for quite a while now and for those of you that have not seen it before, it allows you to integrate Team Foundation Version Control with products that don’t support Team Explorer integration including Visual Studio 6.0 and 2003. I’ve used the beta release of the product and found it to be quite stable and I’m off to download the updated version as soon as I post this.

The release version of the MSSCCI provider has a number of enhancements over the beta versions including;

• GetLatest on Checkout support
  • Work items can be modified in the check-in window
    • Setup works on x64
      • Check-in lock is treated as exclusive
        • Parameters for external diff are passed in the same order as in Visual Studio 2005
          • Open from source control and save to source control operations are enhanced to behave more like Visual Studio 2005 and Visual SourceSafe
            • Defect fixes</UL> The download is available on the MSDN web site here. </p>

Brian Harry has recently blogged about what we can expect to see in the upcoming service pack for Team Foundation Server. The one that interests me most directly is the “Extranet support” that will allow us to use basic auth over SSL for remote connections to TFS thus removing the current need for a VPN. Here’s a rundown from his blog post;

Version Control, WorkItem Tracking and Datawarehouse performance/scale improvements – the majority of these have come from our continued internal deployment.  You can read one of my earlier blog posts for more detail on what kinds of things we’ve hit and addressed.  We’re now seeing great results on our internal servers with these fixes.

 

“Extranet support” – We implemented an ISAPI filter that will allow the intranet to use NTLM and integrated auth while the extra net uses basic auth.  This enables TFS to be more easily deployed in environments where people on the internet need to be able to access TFS without having VPN.

 

WIT Custom Control support – This is a cool new feature.  It is a mechanism by which people can design work item forms that host custom controls.  The data behind the controls can either be persisted in WIT fields or elsewhere.  I’m hoping people go crazy with it and build some awesome custom controls.

 

Bug fixes for Office 2007 (Project and Excel – no Sharepoint 2007 support yet), Vista and the new WAP project support – These were all things that were pretty far from shipping when we shipped so it was not possible to work out all the kinks (bugs on both sides).  Now that  they are much closer and more stable we’ve been able to make them work well.

 

Bug fixes for Dr. Watson reports – We’ve been collecting and analyzing all of the crashes  that have been uploaded through Dr. Watson.  We fixed the top offenders that accounted for a significant majority of all crashes that customers have experienced/reported.