October 2008 Archives

During Brian Harry's "Team Foundation Server 2010 Cool New Features" presentation at PDC, he demonstrated Teamprise working with TFS 2010 (codenamed "Rosario").  Not often you get one of the most senior technical people in Microsoft using Eclipse on stage at the premiere Microsoft conference!  Not only did Brian show some of the work we have been doing in talking with TFS 2010 but he also demonstrated the latest version of the Teamprise Build Extensions that make it very easy to run Ant based builds from Team Foundation Build, but also now publish the results of the JUnit tests into the TFS Data-warehouse for inclusion in reports etc.  Take a look at his session if you would like to see more - available from Channel 9.

As we progress along the road to Rosario and get closer to the TFS 2010 betas and the eventual ship date we will working hard to use of more and more of the Rosario functionality in our Teamprise clients.  As well as thanking Brian for taking the time during his packed session to talk about our integration, I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank the various TFS teams at Microsoft who have been incredibly helpful and supportive in all the discussions we have had with them about TFS 2010 over the past year (and more).  Now that the latest CTP is out, it is great to see what were specs and mock-ups until recently realised into bits that we can play with.  TFS 2010 is shaping up to be a great "V3" release from Microsoft and I am very excited about what the coming months will bring. 

Stay tuned - it's nice to be able to talk about some of this stuff now!

At PDC last night Ed Thomson announced our latest product, the Teamprise Remote Accelerator.  This is a single user Team Foundation Server proxy designed for use by lone remote developers working off-site.  The product was initially developed for internal use as we have quite a few developers that work off site most of the time, like myself.  However when talking with a number of our customers we realised that other people would also get great benefit so we decided to release it as a product.

How Does it Work?

The Teamprise Remote Accelerator looks to Visual Studio or Teamprise clients just like any other Team Foundation Proxy Server.  The notion of a download proxy is part of the Team Foundation Server version control protocol.

Basically, when you want to know the latest version of something the TFS client talks to Team Foundation Server and asks what the latest version of something is and requests a download token.  If a TFS proxy server is configured then the file with that download token is downloaded from the local proxy server.  If the file has already been cached by the proxy server then it can be downloaded immediately over the local network rather than having to wait for the file to be downloaded over the wide area network.

How is this different to the TFS Proxy Server from Microsoft?

Microsoft allow you to purchase TFS Proxy Servers for remote your remote offices.  This software lives on a Windows Server machine in the same domain as the Team Foundation Server and is running IIS.  It is a great solution when you have more than a couple of people at the remote site.  The Microsoft TFS proxy server will get the requested file the first time that someone requests it from the proxy server and when the second person requests the same version of that file they will get it instantly from the local network.  The problem is that the initial user does not see any real performance gain - therefore you need more than one person to make the product worthwhile - unless you seed the cache (see my blog post to explain how to do that with the Microsoft TFS Proxy Server).

The Teamprise Remote Accelerator runs as a process in the notification area of your local machine, so does not need a dedicated server.  It can also be configured to "seed" the cache - i.e. you tell the Remote Accelerator what areas of the version control repository that you are interested in and it will poll the server for changes periodically and download the latest versions of any changed files for you.  That way, the file is more likely to exists locally the first time you ask for it.

Additionally, the Teamprise Remote Accelerator connects to TFS using your TFS credentials - regardless of if your machine is on a domain or not.  Please note that the remote accelerator only connects to TFS with a single set of credentials and these credentials much match those that you are using to connect to TFS.  The Teamprise Remote Accelerator is therefore limited to a single user connection and is not suitable for workgroups.

That said - if you have multiple machines on your network, either physically or you are running Virtual Machines, then you can configure them to point to your local remote accelerator if you wish.

What sort of productivity improvements are we talking about here?

Like everything, it depends on your use.  If you would like to see detailed benchmarks, then take a look at the Remote Accelerator pages on the Teamprise website.  Inside Teamprise we are pretty heavy users of branching and we also run quite a few machines to test access to TFS from lots of different operating systems.  Therefore we are always creating new TFS workspaces and downloading source so we see huge productivity improvements (which was the main reason why we wrote this product in the first place). 

As part of our beta-testing we made early versions of the Remote Accelerator available to a few Team System MVP's and select customers, and they too have been seeing pretty impressive performance.  Fellow Team System MVP (and all-round community legend), Willy-Peter Schaub has been blogging about his experiences here.  Since this version we have made several major performance improvements to the code as part of our release process.

Basically, if you think the Remote Accelerator is of use, then I would encourage you to sign up for a free trial and take it for a spin for 30-days on us.

Sounds nifty - how much is it?

$99 USD per person.

Ok, how do I sign up?

First, I would encourage you to download the Remote Accelerator and then sign up for a free 30-day trial license.  If you have any feedback or comments on the product then let us know.  Once you have decided if the remote accelerator works for your scenario then you can purchase from our store.

What next?

This first release concentrated on performance and functionality.  While we are continually looking to improve the performance of the Remote Accelerator and improve the remote TFS experience, we are also looking to make the product both easier to use and easier to tell how well it is working for you.  If you have anything you would like to see in the next version of the Remote Accelerator then please let us know.

In case you hadn't heard, this week is Microsoft PDC 2008 in LA.  Sadly I'm not able to make it over this time due to some health issues, however the Teamprise team will be out in full force.  We have quite a few new things to show people this week including:

• Integration with TFS 2010
• Publishing JUnit test results into TFS (2005, 2008 and 2010)
• A brand new product!!

So if you happen to be at PDC then please stop by the Teamprise booth at the Partner Expo. Also, Brian the Build Bunny will be making an appearance at the ShowOff event tonight so if you are a fan of Brian's work, then stop by and give him some votes.

If, like me, you are stuck back at the office wishing you'd managed to get out to PDC then don't forget to keep an eye on my blog for Teamprise news through the week and on the Microsoft PDC site to follow the conference virtually.

Earlier in the week I was on a support call with a customer who was seeing strange issues.  It later transpired that they had a TFS workspace configuration issue that we were not able to solve quickly over email.  When we were saying the words “TFS Workspace”, they had been translating this as “Working Folder Mapping” which is a perfectly sensible thing to do for someone new to TFS – but was sadly not helping in this case.  Once we’d ran the user through a couple of scenarios they instantly “got it”.

One of the many pleasures of working for Teamprise is that our end users are nearly all developers which makes our life much easier.  In this particular case, once the customer “got it”, they quickly forgot the time when they hadn’t and became a little apologetic blaming “User Error” for their troubles.

I don’t believe in “User Error”.  I’m not just being cute – I really don’t believe that it exists.  If you went up to a vending machine and instead of a tasty beverage you ended up with a nasty cut you wouldn’t say it was “User Error”.  Equally, when getting into an elevator to ride from the 20th to the 22nd floor, if you had to travel down 20 floors before going up to your destination it isn’t “User Error” that is causing the diversion but an issue with the user interface and the design of the application.  Especially if you go on this diversion more than twice.

Admittedly, there are times when users accidentally do dumb things – and there is a learning curve to all applications (the fun my son is currently having learning his numbers by pressing the buttons in elevators is an example of that learning curve).  However if more than one person is having the same issue with your application then it is a good sign that you have a usability fault and you need to make your application more transparent.  While some usability issues will probably always have to live in your software (especially if it is not a mass-market consumer application) at least try to file down some of those sharp edges in your code.  That way, if they do go off the beaten track then at least they shouldn’t get hurt.