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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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%... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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]

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]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]

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... [More]