Team Foundation Server Build Notification
Included in the Team Foundation Server Tools download is an absolute must-have, Team Foundation Build Notification. If you have are making use of continuous integration chances are that you are building often. Instead of keeping an eye out for the latest build report in your email or constantly checking it in Visual Studio, use this notification utility. It has little popups that appear when someone requested a build either via checkin or ad hoc, which is configurable. It has a notification icon in the system tray (one the few that I will tolerate) and changes whenever one of the builds succeeds, fails or starts. It gives immediate access to the build log which you would normally have to browse for. It is also able to monitor multiple builds. A definite win!
Rollback Changesets
In Team Foundation Server 2008, there doesn’t seem an easy way to simply perform a rollback on a comitted changeset. Well, that is until you discover the power of the updated Team Foundation Server Power Toys.
Rollback command
Before rolling back a changeset, the local workspace must have no pending changes. After issuing the rollback command, tfpt rollback a dialog will appear asking whether you want the local workspace brought up to date with the repository. After affirming the dialog, a get command will be issued for your workspace and updated with the latest changes.
After the get operation completed successfully, another dialog will appear asking you to identify the changeset that you want to rollback. Note: Make sure that you have the correct changeset before continuing.
Select the files that you want to rollback in the changeset and click on “Roll Back”. After the rollback completed, you might have to resolve some conflicting changes. Now that the rollback is complete, you will still need to commit the new changeset, which is the latest code, without the changeset that was rolled back.
If you want to skip all of the GUI stuff, then you can simply execute the rollback command this way: tfpt rollback /changeset:4018.
OneNote 2008
One more favourite tool that I have come to like a great deal is OneNote 2008. Straight from the box I got used to the ease and the flexibility that it provides to capture and layout my notes. It is almost easier than a notebook.
Currently I am designing a website and the way that OneNote helped me organize the research is amazing. Not only that, it has a very handy screen capturing utility that can be invoked at any time using the Windows Key + S.
It also allows you to capture side notes at any point in time by pressing Windows Key + N. Very handy stuff indeed.
Some features of OneNote 2008 includes:
- Gathering your notes and information in one place;
- Automatic saving of your notebooks;
- Organize information in the manner that you want with complete freedom;
- Prioritization and management of your tasks and your to-do list more efficiently;
- Themed notebook pages;
- Sharing of your notebooks;
- Text highlighting;
- Using pens on the note surface;
- Automatic source linking when pasting information;
- etc…
I think I might have abondoned my Moleskine for good after discovering OneNote.
Essential Add-ins for Visual Studio 2008
I present to you a list of essential add-ins for Visual Studio 2008. I have found these add-ins very handy and I hope that they will help you improve your productivity as well.
- Power Commands Adds additional functionality to the IDE, which includes, collapsing the projects in a loaded solution, open command prompt where the highlighted project resides and the ability to remove and sort the using clauses.
- GhostDoc 2008 Automatically generates XML comments either by inheriting the comments from a base class or interface. It is also able to infer comments from method names and properties.
- Regionerate Lets you apply layout rules for regions and code, based on a highly customizable configuration file.
- Mvp.Xml XPathMania lets you write XPath queries against an XML document that is currently open in the Visual Studio IDE.
Note: This is by no means the ultimate list of add-ins for Visual Studio, but is merely the ones that I personally use on a day-to-day basis.
Remember the Milk
Most of the time I find myself running around like a mad thing and inevitably will forget fairly important things. Things that can land me in a fair bit of trouble, if forgotten. Out hunting for a decent task and time management application (I’m sorry todo.txt), I finally found and settled on one, RememberTheMilk.
The feature list and flexibility of this web application is outstanding. For starters, it integrates smoothly with the concepts of Getting Things Done. Here is a post on how to set it up for GTD.
You can add tasks from almost anywhere, be it mobile, Launchy, e-mail or even their own website. There are also a couple of ways to interact with your task lists, such as:
- Remember the Milk Tool – Lets you add tasks rapidly from the system tray
- RememberTheMilk provider for Thunderbird – Lets you access tasks from within Thunderbird
- Add tasks with Launchy – Lets you add tasks directly from Launchy
- Embedding tasks on your desktop – View your tasks embedded into your desktop
- Or, write your own, with their extensive API
For offline access it uses Google Gears, so that you can continue to work with your tasks offline, and then synchronize when you are online again!
Some of the features that just make it that much better, is that it supports:
- SMS reminders
- E-mail reminders
- Recurring tasks
- Multiple lists
- Tags for tasks
- Weekly planners
- Locations integrated with Google Maps
- Synchronize to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile
- Notes on tasks
- Contacts with whom tasks can be shared
- etc…
Well done to the Australian Team!
Team System Web Access for Bug Tracking
If you are looking for a neat customizable bug tracking system that integrates smoothly with Team Foundation Server, then Team System Web Access is for you! What makes it very nice in particular is that there are no extra licensing costs to use this for bug tracking. The licensing scheme was extended to accommodate this specific scenario.
There is one caveat with this approach though. It is very easy to move outside the bounds of this licensing agreement and therefore Microsoft is planning a new power tool codenamed “TFS Bug Submission Portal Power Tool” that will ensure the proper use within the licensing framework.
From the link above the power tool will allow the user to create new work items, edit and view the work items created by the user. The user cannot see work items created by others, list, view, edit, or run work item queries nor can the user add, edit, or remove work item links (except attachments or hyperlinks), access documents, access reports, access source control or access team build.
Essential Team Foundation Server Tools
When you deal with Team Foundation Server as an administrator, extra tools are always welcome. Below is a list and a short description of the (free!) tools that I have found invaluable:
Note: Most of these tools require Administrator rights and when used improperly may result in your TFS Server being broken beyond repair. Be careful and backup!
- TFS Permission Manager: Allows you to add or remove TFS group memberships, Reporting Services role memberships and SharePoint role memberships. Permissions can be set for server and project-level permissions as well as AreaPath and Source Control permissions. You can create new TFS users with permissions identical to those of specified existing user and save user permissions as a template and use it later to create new or update existing users.
- Team Foundation Sidekick: Very nice and handy utility to manage various aspects of the version control system in Team Foundation Server. It now includes a new sidekick called the permission sidekick. Other sidekicks include: Code Review Sidekick, Shelveset Sidekick, Labels Sidekick, History Sidekick, Status Sidekick and Workspace Sidekick. A must have tool!
- Team Foundation Server Power Tools: Handy little tools that improves the Team Foundation Server experience. These tools include: Command line tool (TFPT.EXE), Build Notification tool, TFS Best Practices Analyzer, Process Template Editor, Work Item Templates, Custom check-in policies, TFS Server Manager,
TFS Users tool and an Alert Editor. Note that the TFS Best Practices Analyzer has a dependency on the Windows Powershell. The Power Shell must be installed first. - TFS Admin: If the TFS Permission manager is to confusing to use, try out this tool. It supports adding, deleting, and modifying multiple user permissions from a TFS Team Project and apply them at the same time. It also identifies missing permissions from Sharepoint or SQL Reporting Services and corrects them. Bonus. Allows you to view a log of permission changes that have occured and defines what Sharepoint and SQL Reporting Services permissions should be automatically used when creating a new TFS user.
- TFS Build Manager: A utility to manage Team Foundation build types in an environment other than Visual Studio and allows builds to be stopped and deleted with a lot more ease than what it was in TFS2005.
Most of these tools have been updated to work with TFS2008. I hope that these tools will save you time and make the Team Foundation Server experience so much better!
leave a comment