April 2010 Archives

People using CodePlex can download Visual Studio Team Explorer to access a CodePlex hosted TFS instance free of charge, but what if you want to be a project team member and access the code from Eclipse or a non-windows machine?

Well, I’m proud to say that we’ve continued the tradition and you can now use Team Explorer Everywhere with CodePlex.  Simply download the trial edition of Team Explorer Everywhere and then enter the license key given on the CodePlex wiki.  Note that if you already have a full license to Team Explorer Everywhere (either through retail, volume licensing or MSDN) then you can obviously use this to access CodePlex as well.

Just a quick tip.  When adding the connection, be sure to hop over to the Advanced tab to ensure that you do not have “tfs” in your path.  CodePlex has it’s TFS servers at the root of the server location (as required by older TFS clients and older versions of TFS) – but the Team Explorer Everywhere client will default to the TFS 2010 convention of looking at https://servername/tfs unless you tell it differently.  Also some of SSL certificates on some of the CodePlex servers are signed by a root certification authority that is not in the Java Certificate Store in all Java Runtime Environments running today.  If you run into this problem and you are having SSL issues then you can add the root CA to your Java certificate store.  An easier way is to un-check the “Accept only trusted SSL certificates” which will disable the root certification authority check for the SSL connection to the CodePlex server – but bear in mind that reduces the security of the communication between your machine and the CodePlex server.

Let me know how you get on.  I’m excited to see who takes us up on this offer.  As an encouragement, I’ll send a free copy of my book to the first person who emails me a screenshot of them contributing to a project on CodePlex using Team Explorer Everywhere.

In case you missed it, as part of Bob Muglia’s keynote announcing the launch of Visual Studio 2010 last week he also announced the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Explorer Everywhere 2010.  This is the initial release of the bits that Microsoft acquired from Teamprise back in November and this release is the result of what my team has been working very hard on since that acquisition.

Team Explorer Everywhere contains the following components:

• Team Foundation Server plug-in for Eclipse
• Cross-platform command-line client for Team Foundation Server
• Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010

I’ll post more about what functionality is included in this release, but first I wanted to talk about what this means to existing Teamprise customers.

Teamprise customers should have already got a couple of emails from the company. If you haven’t then head on over to the following site for more information (http://www.microsoft.com/pathways/teamprise).  Basically when Microsoft shipped it’s first release, Teamprise ceased sales of the existing products and will begin the process of wrapping up the company.  Microsoft will be the contact point from now on for all purchases and support enquiries.

Teamprise 3.0 customers are entitled to a free upgrade to the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 version.  You can find out the full details of eligibility and how to claim this license at the following page on the pathways site (http://www.microsoft.com/pathways/teamprise/Teamprise%20v3.x.htm).

If you are a new customer, you’ll be please to know that Team Explorer Everywhere is now also included in the Ultimate level MSDN subscription and is also available as a standalone product for folks without the top tier MSDN Subscription (or indeed without any MSDN Subscription).

If you have any questions of feedback about all this then the pathways site has contact details.  You can also discuss things over on our MSDN Forum.

Working on Teamprise has un-doubtably been the highlight of my career prior to joining Microsoft, and I have to confess to at having a tinge of sadness that the brand we created in our little start-up is going away.  That said all the developers who worked on the product came over to Microsoft and were part of the team that got this new release under the Microsoft banner out the door.  We all worked long hours to ensure that the new version was able to take advantage of many of the TFS 2010 features and I’m very proud of what we managed to accomplish since November.  Also, we’re obviously not stopping there.  Since shipping the initial release we’ve continued development and are hoping to keep getting more functionality out the door.  In addition, now that we are part of the core Team Foundation Server team we get to influence the future direction of the product in ways that I cannot even predict at this time.  The TFS team were always very good at listening to our feedback from a cross-platform point of view – but now we’re all part of the same team we’re even harder to forget :-)

But more on all this soon.  I’ve been so busy helping get Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 shipped along-side the rest of the Visual Studio 2010 release that I’ve been neglecting my blogging and podcasting duties.  But it’s great to be back!