September 2010 Archives

Tonight I’ll be giving a talk on Team Foundation Build for NW-MTUG at the University of Ulster’s Magee Campus.  The event starts at 6.30pm – if you are around it would be great to see you there.  I’ll be giving away a copy of my book to one lucky person prepared to sit through the whole talk :-)

Session Summary:

In this session Martin takes us on a tour of the build automation features provided by Team Foundation Server 2010.  First we will discuss the basics of build automation and why it is the second most important thing you can do to improve software quality in your organization.  Then we will highlight the new features in the 2010 release and how to use them to automate the building of your applications.  Finally we will do a deep dive into customizing the build process and discuss the build experience against Team Foundation Server 2010 from Visual Studio 2008 and earlier.

Location: MS Block, University of Ulster’s Magee Campus at 6.30pm.

UPDATE: Slides from the talk below as promised, or you can download them direct (PPTX 2.8MB)

If you were not able to come along then you can download a free mini-book from the Wrox site which contains my Team Build chapter along with an excellent chapter on Manual Testing by my good buddy Brian Keller.  Or you could always buy a copy of the book of course (from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and all good bookstores in dead tree and electronic versions)

In Team Foundation Server 2010 web access is installed by default.  Therefore you can now happily create links to web access resources and know that there is somewhere that you can point a web browser to to find more information.  However what is less well known is that there is a handy service available in the TFS 2010 object model to help you create the links – the TswaClientHyperlinkService.

Take a quick look at the MSDN documentation for more information, but a quick look at the methods available in IntelliSense shows you some very useful methods including:

• GetAnnotateSourceControlItemUrl – Annotate a file in version control
• GetChangesetDetailsUrl – Show the details for a particular changeset including comments and all the files changes along with links to do comparisons of individual files etc.
• GetDifferenceSourceControlItemsUrl – Show the results of a diff between two files in version control
• GetHistorySourceControlItemUrl – Show the history for a file in version control
• GetHomeUrl – Get a link to the web access application for the server you are talking to
• GetShelvesetDetailsUrl – Show the shelveset details including links to be able to compare the files in that shelveset.  Great for code reviews.
• GetSourceExplorerUrl – Show the passed path in source control explorer
• GetViewBuildDetailsUrl – Show the build report for the passed in build detail.
• GetViewSourceControlItemUrl – Show the passed item from version control.
• GetWorkItemEditorUrl – Show the work item
• GetWorkItemQueryResultsUrl – Run the passed stored query on the server and show the results

Using the link service is very easy if you are used to calling other TFS services in code.  For example:

TfsTeamProjectCollection tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(projectCollectionUrl));
TswaClientHyperlinkService service = tfs.GetService<TswaClientHyperlinkService>();
 
if (service != null)
{
    // View Changeset
    int changesetId = 1;
    Uri viewChangesetUrl = service.GetChangesetDetailsUrl(changesetId);
    Console.WriteLine("Changeset " + changesetId + ": " + viewChangesetUrl.AbsoluteUri);
 
    // View annotate on a file
    Uri annotateFileUrl = service.GetAnnotateSourceControlItemUrl("$/path/to/file/myfile.txt", 
                             VersionSpec.Latest.ToString());
    Console.WriteLine("Annotate: {0}", annotateFileUrl.AbsoluteUri);

}

In the latest episode of Radio TFS Mickey and I sat down for a chat with Jonathan Wanagel who is the Principal Development Manager over at CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting site.  We talk about what CodePlex is, how it uses Team Foundation Server under the hood, their recent upgrade from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 and cover some of the agile practises that the CodePlex team uses to push out a new release of the site every three weeks.

Visit the Radio TFS site to listen in, and while you are there don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in Zune or iTunes to pick up more great shows now that we’re back to our old show schedule.

Today the team released a brand new version of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools.  You can download the latest versions from here:

• TFS Power Tools
• Team Foundation Build Extensions
• MSSCCI Provider (no updates this release)

Brian Harry has a great post highlighting three of the new features in the TFS power Tools up on his blog.  Not only is there now a new Admin Console backup/restore wizard but there have been some handy improvements to Team Explorer of which my personal favourites are “View With…” in Source Control Explorer and “Clone Build Definition…”.  For more details see Brian’s post.

The Team Foundation Build Extensions have also received a bunch of updates based on customer feedback and from our own use internally.  In case you are not aware the Build Extensions allow you to build Ant or Maven 2 projects easily from Team Foundation Server and publish the results of the build along with JUnit test results back to TFS.  We use the build extensions ourselves to build Team Explorer Everywhere, and many of our customers rely on them for their Java builds from TFS.  The new build extensions fix an issue where multiple Ant or Maven builds could not be run in parallel on a machine with multiple build agents installed.  In addition the Ant and Maven extensions were both updated to more accurately set the build status based on the return code from running the tools.

I’m very proud of what the team added to this release.  Download them now and let us know what you think!