Working with gated check-ins can save you time by verifying your changes before committing them to the repository. This is great in terms of keeping your code base healthy and enabling team development. Recently I’ve seen teams start to use this feature and struggle with a consistently breaking gated check-in build. What I noticed was common across these builds was the cause – a locked file.

Gated Check In Build - Locked File Failure

This occurs when your check-in involves a binary file, which TFS automatically forces into a locking check out. This means that when your gated build goes to ‘get’ the file into it’s build workspace it clashes with the lock you have locally.

The fix here is to un-check the “Preserve my pending changes locally” option on the gated build initiation screen. This will undo your local changes and allow the build to get the binary into it’s workspace. The thing to remember here is if the build breaks, you’ll need to know the name of the shelve set to get it back down locally and fix the issue. Luckily it’s right there on the build initiation screen for you, and you can either screen shot or copy it out for later.

Your other option is to use the dialog that pops up with the build results to un shelve the changes…

Results Dialog

Recently I’ve been helping a fellow Readifarian get started on a brand new project using TFS and VS 2010. As always, we’ve seen a few teething issues along the way. Yesterday he was attempting to get his database project to build on his shiny new Windows 2008 R2 x64 build server and was having some issues with the SqlBuildTask failing. The stack trace was pointing to an unresolvable reference to the SQL CE assemblies.

Error Stack Trace

After doing some digging around the MSDN forums and broader web I found some older posts on x64 issues with SQL CE. While this wasn’t my issue, it led me down the right path. What’s happening here is that there is a minor issue with locating the x64 version of the mentioned assembly cause by a bug in the setup of Team Build. The workaround here is to set the MSBuild framework to x86, which in turn makes the database project locate and use the x86 version of the SQL CE assembly.

Important Note: This work around will only be needed in the Beta 2 timeframe for 2010, as the underlying cause of this issue has been fixed for RTM.

Manually moving code between two TFS servers while leaving it in the same place can be a bit confusing. I was trying to guide somebody through the steps on Twitter recently and thought it might be better as a step by step reference guide, so here goes.

As a primer, if you’re not confident with workspaces and working folders, I recommend you take a look at Martin Woodward’s explanation of workspaces and his follow-up on working folders. These are both great articles and will give you a solid understanding of the way in which these concepts are used.

• Unbind from your existing server. This is done via File -> Source Control -> Change Source Control and unbind those you want to move

• Remove the path mapping from your workspace by either removing the workspace itself, or just the path you want to move if the workspace is larger than what you want to move.

• File -> Source Control -> Workspaces

• Remove the paths you don’t need mapped (or use the remove on the previous screen to remove the whole workspace)

• Change TFS servers to your target server via Team Explorer

• Hit the Connect to a Team Project toolbar item

• Either pick your new server from the drop down list, or map a new server.

• Pick the team projects you’d like to see. If you’re using TFS 2010 as either of your servers you’ll need to pick a team project collection.

• Map the path of the code you want to move into a workspace on the target server
  • File -> Source Control -> Workspaces
  • Either add a new workspace for the path, or add the path to an existing workspace
• Use the File -> Source Control -> Add to Source Control to drop the code into the target server

• Check In!

Hopefully this will allow you to move a solution about a little more seamlessly. If you require more than a basic code move (work items or history for example), you should potentially look at other solutions such as a TFS to TFS synchronisation tool.

When using TFS it is good practice when checking in to associate with a work item to describe the cause for change. This creates a relationship between the change set created during the check in and the work item. It’s also exposed through in the TFS API as a property on the change set known as WorkItems. The great thing about this is that it lets you traverse the link in a natural manner, without having to set up the link queries yourself. This is not without its gotcha’s however, as I discovered…

To get your hands on the change set, you’ll initially need to set up a version control server object. Something to watch out for here is when scoping the lifetime of your server object that you’re going to use to get the change set you’ll need to take into account when the work item query is going to happen. You see the property is actually a bit clever about how and when it loads the work items that populate the list. When you obtain your change set, the version control service that you’re using is stored in a property of the change set.

Enter the dangers of not being scope aware!

The issue I am alluding to not so subtly to is one where you de-scope the original team foundation server instance, leaving the change set without an internal (open) server reference. This normally wouldn’t be an issue, as we’ve already got the change set – right? Some digging in reflector shows that our WorkItems collection is actually a lazy load collection, populated on first call and cached thereafter. The process is roughly as follows:

When you run your first get on the list, an instance of the WorkItemStore service is created and a query executed to get the referencing work items. The list of referencing work item URI’s is then used to fetch the work items, and populate an internal list (effectively caching the list for future reference). A clone of the internal list is then returned as the result.

What does this mean to you?

Well, if you scope your server instance with a using statement that is closed before you make use of the WorkItems property your server object (and the internal one used by the WorkItem property) will have already been closed and you’ll recieve a null reference exception. There are 2 ways around this, which you chose is dependent on your scenario. First, include your code that will query the work item list in the appropriate scope. This will extend the lifetime of your server object by the execution time of the extra code at least. The second option is to make an immediate call to the WorkItems property to populate and return you the list, and then allow the server object to be disposed as normal. This means the server object will be closed earlier, but you’ll be carrying around the work item list in memory for longer.

0810 – 0830: VSTS Breakfast

Share a bite to eat with the Canberra VSTS group. Bring your VSTS queries and triumphs and share them!
Quiz your peers on how they are getting the most out of VSTS, and maybe pick up some ideas you can take to work with you.

0830 – 0930 : Session – Using TFS in High Performance Teams

Tatham Oddie – Senior Consultant at Readify, Technical Lead at graysonline.com and an ASP.NET MVP presents a session on his experiences with working in a high performance team with TFS. In his own words…

The redevelopment of graysonline.com, Australia’s largest e-commerce site, was a relatively typical IT project; short deadlines, massively changing scope, and a high level of resource churn. Come along to this month’s Canberra VSTS Breakfast to hear how TFS made the delivery of this project possible.

We’ll discuss the development processes we used, how we extended TFS to enable these processes and the myriad of lessons we learnt along the way. Some of the things we’ll cover are:

• Empowering developers & testers to work together
  • TFS deployer
  • Environment pooling
• Decoupling deployments from sprints
  • Branch strategies
  • Rapid & Regular delivery
  • Flickr: “10 deployments a day”
• Work Management
  • What we customised and why
  • The life of a Product Backlog Item

This is a session not to be missed! Register now at http://cvstsoct09.eventbrite.com/

It’s been a little while since we kicked things off again, and it must almost appear as if nothings happening! Rest assured, I’m working hard on locking in more presenters to continue the successful start we had with Anthony back in July. The next session was due to fall during the week of Tech Ed, so I’ve suspended for a month to avoid a numbers drain on the Tech Ed crowd.

The details of the October session should be up soon – I’m just finalising the little things for hopefully what will be another fantastic session. Stay tuned to canberravsts.org for more info as I publish it!

Flicking through my blog stats on a Friday shows an interesting trend. On Friday my most common search term is generally “connecting to TFS in Excel”. This tells me 2 things – lots of reports are being written on a Friday, and there’s some demand for a starter guide for TFS and Excel integration!

First things first – licensing. The licensing requirements to connect to TFS from Excel and generate reports is fairly simple. You need a CAL. The people you distribute your reports to as either an xls(x) or hard copy won’t require a CAL, with the restriction that they can’t access the server to refresh/update/create data. For more info on licensing you can get the appropriate white papers for 2005 from here, and for 2008 from here.

Right, now we’ve made sure we’re covered by the right license we need a way to connect to TFS.

1. Install Team Explorer

If you’re using 2005, and have the TFS install media you can find it in the TFC directory of the media. Don’t have access to the install media? It’s also available for download from here.

If you’re looking for the 2008 version, you can get it from here.

The downloads both come in the form of an ISO, so you’ll need some kind of ISO reader. WinRAR and 7-zip will both let you extract what you need to do the install. Once you’ve got the files out, it’s a matter of following the bouncing ball through the setup wizard.

2. Open Excel

Now we’ve got a way to connect to TFS, the next step is to open your flavour of Excel. If you’re working with 2003 you should see a toolbar similar to the image below:

Excel 2003 Team Toolbar

If you’re using 2007, you’ll get a ribbon that looks like this:

Excel 2007 Team Ribbon

If you don’t see one of the above, check your install to make sure it completed successfully. You should see an item in your add/remove programs that looks a bit like this

Team Explorer

–Update–

If you’re running Office 2007 you can also check the status of the add-in in Excel. Instructions on the WIT Tools blog here.

3. Get a list of work items

To get the list of work items you’d like to work with you’ll need to click the ‘New List’ button in the toolbar installed with Team Explorer. Depending on your configuration, you might get a credential prompt at this point. If you do, enter the credentials that you usually use to connect to TFS (if you’re unsure, best to contact your TFS admin to find out which set you should be using).

You should then see a dialog asking you to pick a server, and team project to connect to. You’ll need to specify a server if you haven’t already. You can do this by clicking the servers button, then the Add… button.

Connect to TFS Server

Finally enter the URI and the configuration used to connect to your TFS instance. Once again, if you’re unsure – best to contact your TFS admin for these values.

Once you’ve set up a server, pick the team project you’re interested in reporting on and click OK. Double clicking the team project also works.

You’ll now be prompted to pick a query that will form the basis of your work item list. If you like, you can also pick the ‘Input List’ option to enter work items. The queries listed are those specified against the team project you selected. This means if none of those presented suit your needs and you’re not that keen on re-filtering every time you open excel you can go define a new work item query that you can use later to generate lists.

Once you’ve picked a query and clicked OK, Excel will head off to TFS and start building your list. From here on in you’re in Excel land and can generate pivot tables, charts and filtered lists all based off the data you’ve extracted. You can also add work items by entering data into the blank row at the bottom of your list that is denoted with an asterisk.

If you are adding new data – or updating items via the Excel list, you’ll need to hit the publish button to push this data back to TFS before it’s in the system though. An important thing to note here is that if you refresh your data set before publishing any changes you’ve made will be lost. This also applies to any custom formatting you’ve applied to the work item list (though this scenario is addressed in the 2010 integration model).

Well that’s about that. A basic guide to getting a work item list from TFS in Excel that will hopefully simplify the reporting story that most of us go through at some point.

If you go looking for info on the quality center connector you’ll most likely find Jim Lambs blog entry which points back to the connect site for the connector. The problem here is that the connector documentation clearly specifies that this release is of pre-release quality and should not be considered for production systems.

While this isn’t an issue in itself – there’s not much more info out there on the path forward for the connector. I sent an email through to Jim via his blog to see if I could get an idea on what the plan was for the connector. He got back to me within a day to indicate that the connector was effectively not resourced and most likely won’t achieve a production release quality.

With 2010 on the horizon, this isn’t all that surprising as the team is quite busy. The good news is that Jim also indicated that the team are working on a connector for the next version of the product to ensure a path forward for those intending to use Quality Centre with TFS!

I’ve been looking around at integration tools for TFS this afternoon and have just come across a new MSDN page on the VSTS subsite. There’s now a TFS migration and integration tools site, cataloging both free and paid solutions to various client stories for different tool sets.It’s already put me onto a couple of tools I hadn’t seen yet!

Thanks for the awesome resource guys!

Well – July looks like being a massive month for Silverlight here in Canberra! Not only do we have Jordan Knight in town to present the fantastic Silverlight in a Day training session, but Scott Barnes – Microsoft Product Manager for Rich Client Platforms will be in town! I’ve been talking with Adam Cogan who runs the Canberra .Net User Group and there looks like being a special out-of-band user group meeting to give Scott the opportunity to talk to us about all things Silverlight. It’s not too often we have somebody directly involved in the product team in town so bring your questions and suggestions!

Mark these days in your calender now – and if you haven’t registered for the Silverlight in a Day be quick, we’re almost out of seats!

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When: 18th July (0900 – 1700)

What: Silverlight in Day

Where: Cliftons Canberra

Cost: Free!

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When: 28th July (Lunch: 1230-1330,  Evening: 1630-1830)

What: Scott Barnes on Silverlight

Where: Microsoft Canberra

Cost: Free!

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Make sure you don’t miss out on either of these events and rsvp now by emailing me, or for the .Net UG head over to the SSW site to register!