Anith Gopal

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we have just published a new set of Windows Azure prescriptive guidance topics for developers: Windows Azure Developer Guidance This release includes two guidance topics I wrote: Guidance for OData in Windows Azure Using Windows Phone with Windows Azure These topics are about 90% of where I want them, so overall I am pretty happy with them. I will polish them in a coming release

Who is we? We are the project team working on delivering practical and scenario based guidance for the implementation of Team Foundation Server.

You’d think that, with only a couple of different letters, “documentary” and “documentation” were reasonably similar things.

The TFS Integration Tools offer us user value mapping and the Lookup Service when we need to map users from the source to the target systems. While options are great, we need to decide when to use one or the other or both of these technologies. Let’s explore some common scenarios we can encounter in the world of migrations: Scenario 1 All users are the same on the source and the target, either in same domain, different domain or different systems.

The Rangers have made their first appearance in the MSDN Magazine ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx ) with a discussion on branching and merging. Next time we will be visiting Team projects and Team project Collections.

Perhaps I can blame the Christmas spirit (both ethereal and in liquid form) for the fact that I seem to have unwarily drifted out of the warm and fuzzy confines of p&p, and into the stark and unfamiliar world of our EPX parent. A bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I guess

We are busy with TFS Integration Platform and Tools training and I thought it may be an idea to share some of the discussions, based on the readiness package, on this blog.

Context I was introduced to the integrated development environment (IDE) in the 80’s with the CTOS development environment and in the 90’s with the Windows development environment. Since then the evolution of Visual Studio has been astounding and looking at what is to come with Visual Studio 2010, see Better Coding with Visual Studio 2010 for more information, we can merely stand  gobsmacked and in awe. Since the IDE emerged my excitement was, however, stifled with the fact that in practise the “integrated” environment was far from reality.

Grant C. recently sent us this question: “ I saw mention in the log of a TfsMigrationTool.ReflectedWorkItemId field but couldn’t find any docs / discussion about it.  I added it to my target WIT and also added my own TfsMigrationTool.SourceProject field as you can see in the config, but I’m curious if there are any other TfsMigrationTool.x fields the tool automatically sets. ” Great question, which allows us to introduce an originally internal Pioneer dog fooding feature, but one that could be invaluable to users of the TFS Integration Platform in WIT migration and/or synchronization scenarios.

If you are using or considering using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 Team Build, then you must have a look at the AIT Build Suite 2010 at http://www.tfsblog.de/2010/02/07/company-wide-build-processes-a-vision-within-reach (German article: http://www.tfsblog.de/2010/02/05/unternehmensweite-buildprozesse-eine-vision-rckt-in-greifbare-nhe/ ). In collaboration with the Rangers we are considering a build quick reference poster as part of the VS 2010 Quick Reference Guidance , which includes this Build Suite, and have requested AIT to deliver a step-step walkthrough to make this “free” nugget an invaluable asset to the power and standard users of TFS 2010. Take a look at the referenced blog post9s), download  and evaluate this nugget!

In a recent custom adapter development we stumbled across another weird run-time error, which became even more obscure as we started discussing,  debugging and troubleshooting the phenomena: The exception which is relevant in the above screen snippet is: “ Method not found ”. Looking at code, reverse stepping and discussing it with the platform project team resulted in no idea what the mysterious exception was caused by. An inspection of the project settings revealed, however, that many of the copy local properties were set to TRUE, which which unfortunately is the default in Visual Studio

Two kind-of questions recently bubbled up on the radar: Should we manually copy (migrate) files from source to target, to reduce the work that the TFS Integration Platform needs to do? In other words, does it help to be pro-active? No, because this manual action will introduce a “VC content conflict type” for every file that was migrated.