by Ewald Hofman
8. March 2010 20:20
When you work iterative, you might just want to replace your current release or iteration in the query definitions, instead of creating a bunch of new queries. This post shows you how you can perform a quick and simple replace mechanism to achieve this. using System;
using System.Collections.Gene...
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by Ewald Hofman
3. March 2010 12:56
Not long ago, Microsoft announced it had acquired Teamprise. The team does enormous work to transform the Teamprise products into Microsoft branded products. The product has the code name Eaglestone. The first beta version is now available for download.
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by Ewald Hofman
2. March 2010 20:42
In the test manager, you can plan and execute test cases. When you execute a test case you can record the steps you perform on the user interface. The product team did a great job on the platforms they support, but not everything is (fully) supported. If you want to know what is supported, you can f...
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by Ewald Hofman
10. February 2010 14:31
Do you want to know everything about the licensing of Visual Studio 2010. You can get a copy of the whitepaper at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=2b1504e6-0bf1-46da-be0e-85cc792c6b9d
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by Ewald Hofman
10. February 2010 03:30
Based on the blog of Bryan Krieger, http://blogs.msdn.com/bkrieger/archive/2010/02/03/tfs-2010-beta2-to-rc-upgrade-guide.aspx, I upgraded a single server TFS 2010 Beta 2 environment within a few hours to RC. It was a wonderful experience to see how smooth an upgrade can be done. Microsoft, thanks f...
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by Ewald Hofman
10. February 2010 03:27
With the Release Candidate now available for public, the need for guidance how to configure TFS 2010 becomes higher. Jim Lamb has published two videos on YouTube that show how to do this 1. Configure the Application Tier of TFS 2010 2. Configure the build server
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by Ewald Hofman
8. February 2010 16:55
The Release Candidate for VS 2010 is available: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/02/08/vs-2010-net-4-release-candidate-is-available-for-msdn-subscribers.aspx The first impression is that the performance of Visual Studio is astonishing. In the coming weeks I will evaluate the product furth...
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by Ewald Hofman
8. February 2010 16:43
When you created a new build definition in TFS 2008, there were a few lines in the TFSBuild.proj file that gave you the ability to give hints where your references were stored. This was very useful when you included the external references in Version Control, so you did not need to install the assem...
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by Ewald Hofman
1. February 2010 17:43
Microsoft has this year for the DevDays 2010 in the Netherlands the opportunity to submit proposal for four wildcard sessions. The submitting is closed and now it is voting time. The sessions that have the most votes will be presented at DevDays. I have proposed with two session around “Testing wit...
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by Ewald Hofman
25. January 2010 14:32
Times are coming closer to the launch date of VS ALM 2010. Microsoft has just released the pricing for the new products. To refresh the memory, the features in the different SKU’s look like: The prices that belong to these SKU’s are Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010 ...
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
14. January 2010 02:43
Ever wanted to know a quick overview of TFS. The VS ALM rangers have delivered a quick reference post, which can be found over here: http://vs2010quickref.codeplex.com/wikipage. The Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 an...
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by Ewald Hofman
14. January 2010 01:36
Microsoft had decided several weeks ago to postpone the previous launch date. It was a hard decision, but the Product Team wanted to be sure to release a product that met quality standards, including performance. Microsoft has just announced that the new launch date will be April 12, 2010 . Be a...
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by Ewald Hofman
4. January 2010 15:56
Almost two months ago, I posted the following blog item TFS Sidekicks minor release update (2.4)and indicated that there would be support for TFS 2010 Beta 2 at the end of 2009. Attrice has announced that they just released an update for the version 2.4 that supports TFS 2010 Beta 2. For more info...
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
1. January 2010 00:39
So now and then you receive an email which brings a big smile on your face. That could be with a Dilbert mail or with a joke a friend has sent you. Today I received an email that even brought me a bigger smile. Microsoft has rewarded me the MVP award on Team System (or VS ALM as the new name will b...
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by Ewald Hofman
10. December 2009 22:26
In Part 1 I have described how to access the Application Instance of the TFS server. This post describes how you can create a new test case based on the TestManagement capabilities. In later posts I will show what you can do more with the test management.
In order to get access to the work items, a...
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by Ewald Hofman
10. December 2009 21:39
I created a new Team Project in TFS 2010 Beta 2 and choose not to configure SharePoint during the creation of the Team Project. Of course I found out fairly quickly that a portal for TFS is very useful, especially the Iteration and the Product backlog workbooks and the dashboard reports. This blog ...
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by Ewald Hofman
10. December 2009 20:23
In Part 1 I have described how to access the Application Instance of the TFS server. This post describes how you can create access to your work items:
In order to get access to the work items, add a reference to:
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll
You can find the dll&rsquo...
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by Ewald Hofman
10. December 2009 00:31
In Part 1 I have described how to access the Application Instance of the TFS server. This post describes how you can create new work items, including a new linked work item. The new link makes use of the new link type in TFS 2010, so it shows up on the correct tab page. In this example a new User St...
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by Ewald Hofman
6. December 2009 17:48
In TFS you can create your own reports based on the Analysis warehouse. In order to be able to query the cube, you need to use the MDX language. This language is not very intuitive for someone who is used to query transactional databases, since you now have to deal with cubes, slices, facts and meas...
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by Ewald Hofman
5. December 2009 21:48
In Part 1 I have described how to access the Application Instance of the TFS server. This post describes how you can create access to your build controller and agents: In order to get access to the work items, add a reference to: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Build.dll You can fi...
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by Ewald Hofman
3. December 2009 03:28
This is the first post in a series that describes how you can work with the TFS Object Model, API or SDK. In this first part we will open a connection to the team project collection that opens the ability to access all artifacts of TFS. Create a new project and add the following references to your ...
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by Ewald Hofman
1. December 2009 03:55
Today Microsoft has released the first two extensions on TFS: MSSCCI provider TFPT MSSCCI provider With the MSSCCI provider, you can connect to TFS Version Control with environments other then Visual Studio 2008/2010. This provider has shown its relevance to have great adaptation in the ...
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by Ewald Hofman
25. November 2009 00:18
Reporting (SSRS and Excel) in TFS makes use of Sql Server Analysis Server, or OLAP cube. This cube is by default refreshed every two hours. This is in most cases frequently enough to get the correct information. You can however change this default behaviour. You can either change the interval of the...
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by Ewald Hofman
15. November 2009 00:39
When you are an administrator of a TFS environment, TFS Sidekicks helps you out a lot. Of course you can get all information with the command line tools, but I want to use the useful storage in my head for other things than remembering command line arguments. Features that are included in TFS Sidek...
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VSTS 2008
by Ewald Hofman
12. November 2009 21:34
Team Queries are a great way to share queries over the team. In TFS 2008 you had to have the role of a Project Administrator to create Team Queries. Since Project Administrators can do much more, such as the adding and removing users to the team project and change the Team Project settings, you do n...
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by Ewald Hofman
8. November 2009 21:23
Microsoft has announced today at TechEd that it acquired TeamPrise Client Suite. The best known component of this suite is the Eclipse plug-in that allows Java users to integrate with TFS. This is just release by Brian Harry: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/11/09/microsoft-has-acquired-the...
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
8. November 2009 21:16
I am very excited to show the latest and greatest that is available in TFS 2010. Hassan Fadili from the VSTS track in the DotNed community user group and MVP Team System has asked me to do together with him a presentation on this topic. Most of the new things in TFS 2010 will be shown: Administr...
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
6. November 2009 05:28
On of the pillars of TFS 2010 is the “No More No Repro”. This statement is based on the exceptional tooling to improve the communication and information hand-over between the developer and the tester. The tooling that is used is the IntelliTrace (aka Historical Debugging) and the Test Ce...
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by Ewald Hofman
5. November 2009 20:56
In TFS 2008 there is the process template editor to change the work items, or you were able to use the WitImport and WitExport for command line. In TFS 2010 the process template editor is not arrived yet, so you are stuck with the command line tools, but where are the WitImport and WitExport? In TF...
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by Ewald Hofman
3. November 2009 03:33
With the new version of TFS on the horizon, which supports hierarchical links out of the box with a cool user interface to quickly create a nice work breakdown, many of us are still stuck to TFS 2008 (which of course has many great features :) ). This post shows you how you can create the links by m...
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by Ewald Hofman
2. November 2009 05:05
In the 2008 era, the adoption of TFS was blocked because of the costs that small teams had to make to buy Team Foundation Server.
You had two options:
1) the Workgroup Edition
2) the Full Edition
The work group edition was included in a MSDN subscription and supported up to 5 users. So for small...
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by Ewald Hofman
29. October 2009 16:09
As you all know, the Beta 2 has arrived. Because the product is still in a beta phase, Microsoft is looking for feedback from you: the end-user. You have the chance to make the product better!
You can find the survey at https://mscuillume.smdisp.net/Collector...
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by Ewald Hofman
19. October 2009 04:09
Finally, Microsoft has released today the beta 2 for MSDN subscribers today. With the release of this beta 2, Microsoft has also announced a new SKU model.
In Visual Studio 2008, the following model was valid, which consisted of four SKU's. The branding of Visual Studio had terms of ...
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8a7b8c5f-f55c-49f3-97a4-fed4ffd4b468|11|4.9
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
6. October 2009 20:32
In Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has added the code metrics, which gives you information about the quality and maintainability of the application. Unfortunately you can not easily start the code metrics automically, and you can not integrate it from Team Build.
There is NDepend, which has the abili...
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by Ewald Hofman
4. October 2009 22:16
TFS 2010 beta 2 will arrive very soon. This version is very stable, and Microsoft is very confident so it is giving a Go Live license to all customers. You can find more details on the blog of Brian Keller. The blog says:
"But the best news is that beta 2 of Team Foundation Server 2010 will ha...
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
3. October 2009 17:08
A lot of software shops want to use TFS as the time tracking tool. Out of the box, TFS does not provide this information, because all time is entered cumulative per work item. But you can find the information when you look at the transaction database table where all the changes to the work items are...
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by Ewald Hofman
1. October 2009 21:59
Microsoft has announced (http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/01/tfs-2010-for-sourcesafe-users.aspx) that there will be a TFS 2010 basic installation. This version will support the Version Control, Work items, and Team Build. It is meant to be a replacement for all the companies and hob...
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by Ewald Hofman
9. September 2009 03:26
Inspired by agile development methodologies, these two free applications have been designed to make working with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server faster and easier. By promoting robust yet flexible project management practices, TFS Work Item Manager Beta and TFS Project Dashboard Beta allow ...
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by Ewald Hofman
7. September 2009 15:18
I wanted to remove one of the field mappings for MS Project for all team projects. Of course I could create a simple batch file and then retrieve all team project names from somewhere and copy the command several times. But as a real IT guy: I am lazy.
So I wanted to automate the process. Of course...
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by Ewald Hofman
6. September 2009 15:39
Doug Holland posted a very nice suggestion to improve the performance of Code Analyze. Bottom line is to add an option to only analyze the code files that have been checked out. If you like the suggestion, please vote on Microsoft Connect: https://connect.microsoft...
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by Ewald Hofman
1. September 2009 21:41
When you are in a situation where you develop applications that are tightly integrated with other systems, you want to have multiple tests such as the unit test, the system test, the integration test and the user acceptance test. You want the unit test to only bring a class under test, without havin...
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by Ewald Hofman
30. August 2009 16:43
When a user is removed from AD, all work items the user has created and/or changed can't be saved anymore. To overcome this issue, you can do the following
Step
Description
1
Download the TFS 2008 power tools from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=00803636-1d16...
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by Ewald Hofman
20. August 2009 22:51
A collegue asked me to help him out with his database deployment on the build server. In the past I did that before, with a lot of strugle and thought that using the same script could be simple applied to make it happen. Of course it didn't work out in that way. In my quest to solve the problem, I f...
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by Ewald Hofman
16. August 2009 22:27
Problem
When I heard from TFS the first time in 2005 I was very delighted to see the MS Project integration with TFS. When starting my first project in TFS, I immediately started to use MS Project to plan the project. Finally I was able to see what the impact would be for the project and also use i...
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by Ewald Hofman
13. August 2009 00:47
Update #1 January 8th, 2010: There is an updated post on this topic for Beta 2: http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2009/12/10/Configure-TFS-portal-afterwards-Beta-2.aspx I created a new Team Project in TFS 2010 Beta 1 and choose not to configure SharePoint during the creation of the Team Project. Of co...
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by Ewald Hofman
3. August 2009 21:41
By default the description field in the work item definition (for example the Task work item), is plain text. To modify the type of the field to Html, you have to do the following:
Step
Action
1
Open the command prompt (Run as Administrator)
2
Go to the folder %Program Files%...
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by Ewald Hofman
3. August 2009 17:28
When you create a new work item, you don't always know who exactly should pick up the work. In that case you want to introduce a role to the work item's assigned to field. To do this, you have to make a modification to the work item:
Step
Action
1
Open the command prompt (Run as Admi...
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by Ewald Hofman
2. August 2009 14:32
When you add files to Source Control, some of the files are excluded automatically, such as dll files.
You can change the default setting by modifying one of the following registry keys:
Per-User: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\AddOpt...
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by Ewald Hofman
30. July 2009 16:08
There is in the Beta 1 version a bug that blocks processing the OLAP cube when you install a fresh instance of TFS 2010. This issue is solved in Beta 2.
To workaround this, do the following:
In a browser navigate to this URL: http://<servername>:<port">http://<servername>:<p...
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6a6a7ccb-692c-456b-bd3b-d177ca3f99d5|0|.0
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
26. July 2009 15:34
A common scenario when you use TFS and Team Build, is that you want to update your build number during that process. There is the AssemblyInfoTask to accomplish that, but the downside of this approach is that it will create an extra changeset on every build. When you use a braching strategy, th...
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by Ewald Hofman
20. July 2009 20:42
When you are working in an enterprise that has a lot of team projects, it is hard to make generic modifications to the work item types. Imagine that you want to add a field to all work item types in all team projects, first in the staging environment, then in the production environment. This means a...
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by Ewald Hofman
20. July 2009 19:38
When you are working in an enterprise that has a lot of team projects, it is hard to make generic modifications to the work item types. Imagine that you want to add a field to all work item types in all team projects, first in the staging environment, then in the production environment. This means a...
[More]
by Ewald Hofman
20. July 2009 19:09
Introduction
When you are working in an enterprise that has a lot of team projects, it is hard to make generic modifications to the work item types. Imagine that you want to add a field to all work item types in all team projects, first in the staging environment, then in the production environment...
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by Ewald Hofman
16. July 2009 15:49
When teams are adopting Team System Web Access, they get stuck in a known issue in Team System Web Access. It allocates a lot of memory that is not freed up. So over time you can see error messages that cannot be explained.
To improve the performance of your TSWA installation you can do the followi...
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by Ewald Hofman
8. July 2009 16:55
A frequently heard complaint about using the time fields in the work item is that there is already another system in the organization to enter the working hours in. Using the time fields in the work item would mean a double time management system, which can be out of sync.
To come around this, I cr...
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by Ewald Hofman
6. July 2009 03:53
When there are problems that are related to source control or anything else with Team Explorer, the first step to resolve the issue is to clear the cache. You can do that by emptying the C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0\Cache folder on yo...
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082c1550-7315-48a7-acac-78f0e0b49c53|1|5.0
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VSTS 2008
by Ewald Hofman
2. July 2009 18:05
It is possible in Version Control to override the security settings per folder. To do that uncheck the "Inherit security settings" and you can add, modify and remove the permission.
When you accidently remove all accounts from the list, then it is not possible to view the contents of the folder for...
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by Ewald Hofman
1. July 2009 04:29
When you create a new build definition there is a step by default that will create a work item when the build fails. This work item is customizable, but there is also the possibility to not create a work item. To deactivate the work item creation on a build failure, add the following line to your pr...
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Team Build
by Ewald Hofman
29. June 2009 22:39
The reporting warehouse for TFS is rebuild by default every hour. This is in normal situations accurate enough.
However, when you are testing how your modifications to your TFS artiface will be represented in the reports, you want to force to rebuild the TFS warehouse. You can achieve that by openi...
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by Ewald Hofman
24. June 2009 14:47
When I created a Team Project under the same account as the TFS installation was performed, I was able to create a new team project.
Unfortunately, I got an error message that I did not have enough rights:
---begin Exception entry---Time: 2009-06-23 09:28:24ZModule: WSSException Type: Microsoft.Te...
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by Ewald Hofman
15. June 2009 16:50
When you develop a new report for TFS and you want to deploy the report to all team projects, you have to do a lot of work to upload the file and to set the datasources.
This post uses TFS 2008 and SQL Server 2005
There is an easy way to automate that.
1. Add the web service to Reporting Ser...
[More]
2808fbac-50fc-4898-8877-4fa60a5a3fee|1|5.0
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Reporting
by Ewald Hofman
2. June 2009 04:41
To calculate the project velocity, TFS summarizes all remaining work of all work item types in the iteration. Imagine you have a breakdown of work items, such as at the top level a User Story, which is broken down into Tasks.
The project velocity should be calculated by summarizing the Remaini...
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902bede5-db0e-485e-9558-b2e3c34f875f|0|.0
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
1. June 2009 22:58
It is possible to add a SSRS report to your Project Portal. In this way you can create a nice dashboard on you portal home page. This dashboard can consist of multiple reports, or can vary for the different roles in your team.
On the Site Actions menu, choose the Edit Page action
Click on Add a ...
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284659cb-e0d7-4722-b77b-66efc4768f4b|0|.0
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Reporting
by Ewald Hofman
27. May 2009 19:21
I have installed on Windows XP the Visual Studio 2010 Team System Beta 1. When playing around with the iteration Backlog workbook, I was unable to retrieve the Historical Data. The VB editor popup up with the following error.
When looking at the references of the workbook, it was indicating ...
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d90ea993-91cb-4915-b366-d13d2db68597|0|.0
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
21. May 2009 04:57
When you make a connection to TFS with the Team Explorer, it will try to connect with your current credentials to the TFS environment. There are two scenarios in which you want something else:
1) You current identity has no access to TFS and you are prompted for the credentials every time you make ...
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General
by Ewald Hofman
18. May 2009 21:43
Since a few days, the first beta of TFS 2010 is released. The installation went very smooth. Microsoft has put a lot of effort in the installation experience of TFS.
I choose the run Default Configuration wizard. At my installation on Windows Server 2008 there were some caveats:
1) The Readiness C...
[More]
4a83df88-c6de-4f22-aa7f-dd220198a115|0|.0
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VSTS 2010
by Ewald Hofman
13. May 2009 07:32
Introduction
In Team Foundation Server 2005 and 2008 it is possible to define links between work items. By doing this, you can imply a work breakdown for your project. This work breakdown is not explicit, since these links are not hierarchical. Therefore is the only report in TFS that does somethin...
[More]
by Ewald Hofman
11. May 2009 07:17
When you want to create a report that contains detailed data, not all fields are in the TFS warehouse. Think of text fields like description, how to reproduce, and so on. To be able to add these fields to your report, you have to write a web service that reads from a Work Item Query. This web servic...
[More]
a41d705f-8b23-4eda-87af-04dd4f18ead9|2|3.0
Tags:
Work items
by Ewald Hofman
11. May 2009 06:51
Past days several times I got the question from customers how to update multiple work items at once. In Visual Studio this is not possible, but you can do it within Excel, MS Project and Team System Web Access.
Excel and MS Project
In Excel or MS Project you can get the work items from a wor...
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440b51a3-f79e-47ba-b805-1df88200aae2|0|.0
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by Ewald Hofman
7. May 2009 15:38
Whenever you encounter a bug or have a feature request for Visual Studio, you can post it at Visual Studio Connect.
6cdf5d85-1084-48fc-8043-84ca4769032d|0|.0
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by Ewald Hofman
5. May 2009 20:50
With the introduction of TFS 2008 SP1 it is possible to prefill the values when you create a new work item in Team System Web Access (TSWA) and Work Item Web Access (WIWA). You can achieve this by adding the value intial values for the fields of the work item in the url.
http://Server:Por...
[More]
3399cd67-a4e6-46c0-94c1-0ef5a34ef80a|0|.0
Tags:
Work items
by Ewald Hofman
5. May 2009 04:26
In Visual Studio you might experience a red cross in the documents or reports folder, while other users don't have the issue.
When this occurs you can resolve the issue by resetting Visual Studio. Be aware that when you start the reset all user settings are reset too. To work around this, y...
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c61474a4-2f02-414e-8674-29e319c2fb52|1|1.0
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