I’ve just arrived into the office and what should I spy on the MSDN subscriber site but Team Foundation Server Release Candidate.
Don’t forget to read Rob Caron’s great posts to help you get started installaing and upgrading to this release.
Rob Caron has posted today that his invaluable Team Foundation Installation Guide is now available for the TFS Release Candidate. This is a MUST-USE piece of documentation for anyone wishing to install Team Foundation Server RC. Hopefully the TFS RC should appear on the MSDN Subscriber download site in the next day or so.
The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider has been available as a pre-release beta for a little while now and I finally had a need to install and test it today with a VB6 installation. For those of you interested, here’s a recount of my experience installing the MSSCCI provider and adding a new VB6 project into TFS.
Installing the VSTFS MSSCCI Provider
Double click the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider.msi installer. I just ran through a stock standard default installation into the default location for the purpose of getting my testing started. Reminder: After the installation, you will see “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005” in the start menu. This is how you access the Team Explorer, it is not an actual install of VS2005 (unless of course you have already installed VS2005 on the same PC)</li>
Once installed, you can see a Team Foundation item in the Tools menu as shown below.
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</ol>Adding a new VB6 Project to Team Foundation Server
The first thing I did was create a simple Windows Hello World project in VB6. When I went to save the project, I was prompted with a question asking if I wanted to “Add this project to Team Foundation” as shown below.
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The next dialog asks you to choose or add a new workspace. For my test, I just created a new workspace named VB6Workspace.
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After adding the workspace, select the new workspace name and click OK. You will then be prompted to select a location to store your project in the team foundation server and in your local workspace.
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The next step prompts you to identify which files you want to add to Team Foundation Server. I selected all my hard work and left a nice detailed comment as well
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Once this was complete my sample VB6 project was nice and securely stored in TFVC. A quick visit to the Source Control Explorer confirmed this.
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On first impressions, the standard check-in/check-out works completely as expected. I will spend some more time with it and see how well it performs (for a pre-release product anyway).
John Lawrence posted an interesting article yesterday concerning the error you are most likely to get if you upgrade your Team Foundation Server to the upcoming Release Candidate and try to hit it with older versions of Team Explorer. I subscribe to the belief that prewarned is prearmed so it was great to see the post out nice and early so people can be aware of it before we start upgrading to TFS RC. Thanks for the post John.
Here’s the error image from John’s post showing the error dialog box.
A while ago I posted about my experiences with a Continuous Integration solution developed and blogged about by Khushboo Sharan and Kishore M N (both from VSTS team). Their solution has been working well now for nearly a month and it adds what I feel is a “must have” feature to TFS.
They have now published an article on MSDN to accompany their solution. This is well worth a look if you are interested in configuring Continuous Integration for your own solutions. The artiel is available on the MSDN website here.
John Lawrence has posted the latest TFS Dogfood Stats on his blog for those of you interested in how Microsoft’s internal development TFS server is performing. One highlight that John talks about in his post is that they have now broken the 500 user limit for the first time on their server…
This report represents a significant milestone. In the week covered we’ve had 517 distinct people use the dogfood server. This is the first time weve broken 500 and a new record by a pretty wide margin. Youll also notice a huge spike in checkins this week. This is due to a new team that have started dogfooding on the server who have been doing 3,131 checkins as part of a conversion process.
Jeff Beehler’s been busy on his blog detailing a few of the major changes between TFS B3 and the upcoming Release Candidate. If you have downloaded the December CTP you may have seen a couple of these already.
Here’s a summary of the points on his blog post. Well worth a closer look.
Read his blog post here 
Lead Program Manager on the VSTS Team, Jeff Beehler has posted an update on the expected release date of the Team Foundation Server Release Candidate. I looks like the first week or two in February is the most likely time we can expect to see this. Read his blog post here. It sure sounds like the TFS team have been busy pushing to get things finished up for the release.
For the Ozzies reading this blog, Jeff’s scheduled to visit Australia in March this year. Keep an eye on Chuck’s blog for details.
Well my VSTS Proof of Concept training at Microsoft has come to a close and it has been a full three days at the Microsoft Sammamish Campus (just south of Redmond) at the start of this week. The trainer, Mark Michaelis, was very knowledgeable and despite most of the class not meeting the prerequisites he managed to ensure a very success course.
I had expected to blog about a few new things I learnt during the class but given the long class hours the last thing I wanted to do was stare at a computer screen when I returned to my hotel 
. I hope to get time over the next week to catch up on some blog posts and get a few HowTo articles published on the blog as well.
I am hoping to redeliver a very similar course through the Australian Partner Readiness program around Australia in the coming months so be sure to keep an eye out for that if this interests you.
Coincidently the author of The Build Master, Vincent Maraia, was a student on the class and I have managed to get halfway through his book before I flew over. If you haven’t already read this book, it’s a great read.
I’m writing this post while I sit in the Alaska Airlines gate lounge at LAX on my way up to Seattle for some VSTS training. It should be a great course and I’m really looking forward to it. I have also arranged to catch with with the BlogFather of VSTS, Rob Caron whom I met during the Ready To Launch event in Canberra. I’m quite looking forward to seeing the office where he keeps many of us up to date with all things relating to VSTS.
Well that’s it for now. I’m sure there’ll be lots of great things to share during the course this coming week.