Omar Villarreal's WebLog

Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 and Work Item Web Access 2008 CTP's Available!

2008-04-10T22:11:00Z

Service Pack 1 of the Team System Web Access tool is coming and the Community Technology Preview is ready for you to look at. Details about this release can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2008/04/09/what-s-new-in-tswa-2008-sp1.aspx

Plus, by popular demand, a new tool will be released that users without a Team Foundation Client license can use to add and edit Work Items. More information here: http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2008/04/09/what-is-work-item-web-access-wiwa.aspx

Tell Microsoft what to do!

2008-03-28T03:36:00Z

... in regards to the next release of Visual Studio team System codename "Rosario".

That is correct. The Team System Product Group has posted a selection of Rosario specifications for you to review and provide feedback. They want to hear from you and this is your opportunity. I am sure you have a little something for Microsoft to hear about. But I am not the kind of person that will pollute search engine results by copying somebody else's blog post, Instead, I'll just give you the source:

Jeff Beehler's blog post about this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/03/26/more-team-system-rosario-specs-available-for-review.aspx

The page with the specifications:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb936702.aspx

Enjoy!

-OmarV

TFS Times

2008-02-25T23:48:31Z

For those that may not yet be aware of it, there is a monthly TFS Newsletter at http://www.tfstimes.com/news/. Look for an article from me on it before long.

Dallas Team System Users Group meeting coming up!

2008-01-21T04:48:00Z

Our next meeting is on January 29th. Please register on http://www.DallasVsts.com to stay in the loop. The information will be posted on the site this week, the meting topics are:

- Branching Strategies and
- Automated Builds (as time permits)

There is a $2 entry fee for now. We hope to be able to eliminate that before long. It will be at 6:00 PM at the Notion Solutions' office in Las Colinas (Irving, Tx) :

6230 N. Beltline Rd.
Suite 301
Irving, Tx. 75063
[Map]

What an event!!

2008-01-21T04:23:00Z

I just got back from doing some volunteer work at the Charity Challenge Weekend event. I was behind the camera (well, most of the time) while the 16 or so teams presented their work so I got to see what they all did. It really was an impressive and amazing event. I learned about charities that I did not even know existed and best of all, because they were showing how big a difference each of the volunteer development teams made for all of these charities. Having been the president of the Dallas .Net Users Group for two years (not without the help of a few friends that I really trust) and having put together two Code Camps (with a lot of help too) this event was nothing like the developer community events we have seen in Dallas, "Very Noble" is the first I could think of to describe the Charity Challenge Weekend event.

There were all kinds of software needs from these charities, some were really big challenges; kudos to those developers that barely slept this weekend in order to make a difference in our community. I really was impressed by some of the work that was done in just one weekend.

I guess I got my point across, I am impressed and can't wait to be part of it the next time it is done. Congratulations to the people that put it together: Toi Wright, of the Dallas ASP.Net Users Group, Chris Koenig, J. Sawyer and Josh Holmes from Microsoft, the people from BravoTech and I am sure there are more people that made it possible and I just don't know who they are.

You too can make a difference! See you there next time!!

Rebuilding your Team Project's SSRS folder

2007-12-27T20:55:00Z

I had a problem with Reporting Services, I basically could not create Team Projects and it got to the point where it looked like the only solution was to do a fresh TFS (2008) installation. So I uninstalled pretty much everything a started over but without removing the TFS databases (I did have to get rid of the SSRS DBs). After reinstalling, as expected, my reports were gone, and so were the project portals. What I had in front of me was up to one day of uploading and manually configuring the reports for the different Team Projects, one by one. I figured there should be a better way to do it so I started searching... and I found! I found a very nice tool that saved me a lot of time and I thought I'd share it with you:

http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=62

This tool helped me copy reports, including all their configurations and settings that otherwise I would have had to do by hand. All I had to do was create a new Team Project (the one I couldn't create earlier) and use it as a source to copy all the reports to the different Team Project folders in SSRS that I had to re-create manually.

Special thanks to its author!

Very successful first Dallas VSTS UG Meeting!!

2007-12-05T13:58:00Z

We had a very successful meeting last night at the Dallas VSTS Users Group. Special thanks are in order to Dave McKinstry for taking care of the dozen people that showed up. The meeting was on Process Templates and was very interactive.

First "Rosario" CTP is out!!

2007-08-03T23:45:00Z

The first CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" (the version following VSTS-2008) is now publicly available on the Microsoft Download Center.

Check out Jeff Beehler's blog post and the Rosario CTP White Paper for details about this release.

Building Visual Studio 2003 solutions with Team Build

2007-03-27T21:26:00Z

I recently had to customize a Team Build script to build only one VS2003 solution and found that Nagaraju Palla's approach #2 in this post was the best way to do it. However, since I had no other solutions to build and this was a VS2003 solution, I had to remove the <SolutionToBuild> item from my TfsBuild.proj file; I could not use it to specify the VS2003 solution there because that item is expected to have VS2005 solution files. Later on I found out that those Team Build runs were not making it to the "Builds" report.

I had to make it work so I started troubleshooting it until it came to a point where I had to create a blank VS2005 solution; I checked it into the same folder where the VS2003 solution was and specified that VS2005 solution file in the <SolutionToBuild> item. This was the only way I was able to make the build runs show up in the Builds report.

Even though I gave it a very meaningful name (VS2005BlankSolutionForTeamBuild.sln) I was not entirely happy with having to add a file to the SCC Repository just for that purpose (an alternative was to create the solution file in my build script but I didn't like that either). After exchanging some emails with some Microsoft folks they explained to me what is going on there and then it all made sense.

I am not going to go into the details they gave me because it would not help you at all. I just hope that people are able to find this post when they need it.

I realize that I wrote this post assuming that the reader will have some experience customizing team build scripts and will know what I am talking about. If you need more details feel free to drop me a note through the 'Email' link on this blog and I will try to help.

Another thing that you may find useful when building VS2003 web projects in Team Build is this post from Jeffrey Palermo on how to remove the IIS binding from a VS2003 project file.

-OmarV

Web access for Team Foundation Server is now free!!

2007-03-26T20:54:00Z

TeamPlain has been acquired by Microsoft and while you still have to have a TFS Client Access License (CAL) to connect to TFS, you no longer need to pay to have a web interface. See Brian Harry's post for more details.

-OmarV

Dallas Code Camp V2

2007-03-15T15:50:00Z

Finally! Our second Dallas Code Camp is coming. It will take place on April 21, 2007 at the Microsoft Las Colinas offices. Registration information and the agenda will be made available in the next few days. if you are not already registered on the site and would like to stay informed be sure to register on the Dallas Code Camp web site to be added to the mailing list. Click on the logo to check out the site.

Dallas Team System User Group

2007-03-15T15:39:00Z

Do you live in the Dallas area and you are currently using or involved in any way with TFS or any of the Team Editions of Visual Studio? If you would like to be part of the Dallas VSTS User Group send me an email to president@ddnug.net and I will keep you posted about the formation of this group. Please describe your involvement with VSTS in your email.

Thank you!

- D. Omar Villarreal

Searching Work Items

2007-03-15T15:28:00Z

Many people ask for Work Item Queries to be interactive, to prompt the user for parameters. Noah Coad recently made a Work Item search tool available in his blog. You can find it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/noahc/archive/2007/03/08/search-work-items-team-system-addin.aspx.