Anith Gopal

  If you are wondering what the WCF Load Test tool tool is all about, have a peek at the blog of the UK Solutions Development Team of Microsoft Consulting Services, for a great walkthrough: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsuksoldev/archive/2010/12/03/generating-load-tests-for-wcf-services-with-the-wcf-load-test-tool.aspx

Bob has posted an excellent troubleshooting blog post when integrating Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on separate servers.   He states the purpose of the post as (quoted as is from his post): The purpose of this post is to provide clear and concise steps for a very specific scenario: Integrating TFS 2010 with SP Server (SPS i.e. formerly MOSS) 2010 TFS and SPS are on different server boxes SPS is installed on a single sever machine Find and bookmark the nugget here

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.

In Requirements Management for Ranger Projects … Epics, Team and Personas we mentioned the Rangers requirements management and the concept of Epics, also referred to as Experience. Here is the list of Epics from the Rangers Build Customization Guide project: For those that are squinting at the above image, here is a more readable list: Epic – Practical guidance and tooling to simplify the Team Build 2010 "Build" customizations Epic – Practical guidance to utilize Team Build process templates to automate build and non-build scenarios in Microsoft environments Epic – Practical guidance that allows utilization of Team Build process templates to automate build and non-build scenarios in non-Microsoft environments Epic – Practical guidance to enable simple and flexible flexible deployment of applications and their data stores Epic – Practical guidance for Activities to empower developers and build engineers Epic – Quality hands-on-labs that complement the guidance and effectively guide the user through the features Epic – Visualisation of the guidance using quick reference posters Do these Epics make sense? Do these Epics summarise the killer features of the project?

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!

Thanks to “candid” feedback we have revised a number of the basic and supporting posters, for example, changing references to Historical Debugging with IntelliTrace. Find the latest packages here: http://vs2010quickref.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=37144 Thank you for the feedback! Keep it coming, because it allows us to continuously improve the guidance.

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.

We introduced the leads for VSTS Rangers Projects – VSTS 2010 101 Guidance: Who are the Leads? … let’s continue the introductions, by chatting about the third project I am responsible for and have the pleasure of working with a great bunch of leads and other team members

If you are expecting a lengthy discussion in ALM and/or SDLC, then you may want to skip this post, because the core theme of this post is to figure out how we can make the related content relevant and appealing to all stakeholders of software projects, especially the developers and testers. Acronyms Before we begin, we should resolve the acronyms SDLC and ALM, as many of us dislike horror of or are unfamiliar with TLAs (three lettered acronyms) or FLAs (four lettered acronyms)

Driven by Robert , the new SA Architect community site has emerged in South-Africa.