My publishers are sponsoring a book giveaway contest.  So, here it is:  Come up with a good reason you’d like a free copy of my book (philanthropic project, etc.)  I will pick the best one out of the set (totally subjective I know) and the publisher will send you a copy of the book.  Fairly simple right ?  So either post a comment or send me email referencing this and that will be your entry.  Here is a link to my book on their site: http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-and-project-server-2010-integration/book

Good Luck!

In case everyone is wondering why I’ve been light on the blogging lately, this is it.  Just got done with publishing my first book with Packt Publishing.  It is titled Team Foundation Server 2012 and Project Server 2010 Integration How-to, and is available on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688540/?tag=packtpubli-20

The publisher also wanted me to share this link http://bit.ly/ZulWBG but it really will just bring you to their site for an ebook only ordering page.  I’ll post some excepts from the book here as well as some cool info the the MVP 2013 Global Summit.

Just got back from the 2012 Microsoft MVP Global Summit in WA.  While the Windows 8 Consumer Preview got most of the media attention, as an MVP in ALM my attention was on what Microsoft was doing with Team Foundation Server 11 and Visual Studio 11.  Some of what we learned on future direction was covered under strict NDA, but we are allowed “released” info, which in this case is the VS 11 / TFS 11 beta.  So as always, your mileage may vary a little since I’m basing this off the beta.

Overview

There is a lot to be excited about for all the roles in an organization in the new releases.  Developers and Testers will be especially pleased, but I wanted to cover some the new items that Project Managers and Product Owners will be particularly excited about.  Though certainly a developer centric toolset, Microsoft is starting to realize that getting world class software products out the door requires more than just well equipped developers, and they want Visual Studio to be at the core of it.

First the Upgrade

A quick note here on the Upgrade.  I upgraded one of my combination TFS2010/VS2010 virtual machines right in the Summit (figured I could get some help that way if anything popped up ).  My only surprise here was I needed to fully uninstall TFS before continuing.  This is one of the reasons you always need to have a solid machine and DB backup before attempting this.  I would have figured the upgrade wizard could have handled this, and a roll-back if it failed, but its just something to keep in mind.  If you are working on a scaled out TFS installation, you will need to touch each server.  I’d never recommend running out and upgrading a production TFS instance on a beta release but it is encouraging that Microsoft will be supporting that upgrade path right through to RTM release though.    I’ll cover more details of the upgrade process in another post.

Deeper into Agile

One encouraging theme I picked up on while at Microsoft was an definite embracing of Agile and Scrum specifically.  Anyone who has used TFS for any length of time knows you can configure it for almost any process, however who wants to spend the time doing this for each team you work with.  If you are one of the many organizations jumping on the Agile/Scrum bandwagon (if you aren’t you should ask why) you’ll be very happy with this release.  The Visual Studio team has put out upgraded Scrum, Agile, and CMMI Process Templates (final names not decided, but in beta its Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 – Preview 3, for the new Scrum one and MSF for Agile Software Development 6.0 – Preview 3).  If you are starting out with a new Team Project you’ll get to dive right into the new stuff, but as in the last release, if you are working with a 2010 project you’ll need to do some import / export work in the Process Template Editor.  The good news is though you can continue with your existing template until you are ready. I’ll cover the template upgrade process in a later post.

Sprints, Backlog Management, Burndowns, Task Boards and Teams

These sets of features should get you excited if you run software development projects.  Sure we had some of these in TFS2010, but you had to work with a combination of Work Item configuration and some spreadsheets (Iteration Backlog, Product Planning) that were shipped originally with the old Agile template and had some serious bugs in them. 

Now all of this functionality is in the core product and fully accessible from the new Team Web Access web site and Visual Studio, with drag and drop support.  What this means is if you are starting out a new Team and Team Project this wont take you hours of work like it used to.  I’ll add some screen shots of these here shortly.  If you were already using the Agile or Scrum template and customized your User Story work item you may have some adjustments to make with the new template.  Same situation if you went wild with States.  The new Template really only supports 3 of them, you’ll  need to map to these.

The Task Board is a brand new item.  If anyone has looked at VersionOne’s task board, then this one will look real familiar.  Basically it is an electronic Story Board or Kanban board for instant status on where your User Stories and supporting Tasks are at.

Also new are the support of product teams.  This allows the proper status of the Tasks as they may relate to multiple product teams.  Again this is something we can configure right in Team Web Access.

Storyboarding

Another new tool on the horizon is the Storyboarding Power Point plug in.  This item warrants its own post, but in summary it will allow an analyst (i.e. a non-programmer) to put together an animated collection of proposed product screens quickly to avoid the dreaded “that’s not what I wanted” statement.

I’ll be adding to this post as I get more screen shots and the rest of my notes together from the MVP summit.

The Team Portals in TFS 2010 were a huge bonus for any PM or Scrum Master looking to point stakeholders and teams to one spot for critical project communication and documentation.  The Team Portals are designed at a Team Project level. The problem you quickly run into with the Team Portals however if you further divide your Team Projects up by Areas for each solution.  You could certainly customize the templates or use the API to develop a tool to do solution level portals but that may be more work than you really want to do.

If your Team Project is already created, and you really need a portal for each area, the simplest solution would be to just manually create a portal using the sam design elements (very easy), copy the reports folder to a new one for just your area (to cusomize later) and create a team query to display the common lists by area and set the lists to use these. If you need to set the burndown (if you are using an Agile process template) to just use that area you'd need to also change the default filter on SSRS reports to reflect just the area you need.

I will update this post in the future with some specific instructions for doing this.

Recently I addressed a question in a forum where a user wanted to move his TFS 2008 server out of its current domain.  In TFS 2010 this is fairly straightforward using the TFS Administration Console, but back in TF 2008 this took a little more work.  Here it is at a high level:

There are numerous prep steps moving a server from one domain to another but I'm assuming you'd have these covered already in the systems migration planning.  Theese are the TFS highlights:

1. Back up your server. Take a thorough inventory of your TFS security settings and determine if you referenced any domain groups. You can set these to a local group for now and move them into a domain group later.
2. Record the login credential settings of all TFS services and Application Pools. These may or may not be set to Domain group, if they are you will need to go back in after the Domain migration. Depending on how your tiers are set up this may involve checking a few servers as well.
3. Shut down all TFS services and Application Pools and Web sites to avoid any user issues during your migration. You'll need to put the services on manual or disabled to avoid them trying to restart during the migration since a reboot will be needed to complete the domain migration.
4. Execute your domain migration as planned.
5. Change the identity of everything you noted with domain specific identity in step 1 to an identity in the new domain. Set all the services back to their original startup settings, and app pools & web sites back to their original states.
6. Restart the server and check TFS access.

I know there are some cool tools out there for this, but I wanted to share my “quick and dirty” query I use to get a list of TFS users, you'll need to adjust the USE statement to your collection db:

   1:  USE Tfs_DefaultCollection 

   2:  GO 

   3:   

   4:  select distinct IdentityName as [Recent Users] 

   5:  from tbl_Command with (nolock) 

You'll need to use with caution on a heavily loaded server since it runs against the transactional DB but an occasional run would be fine.

I get this question a lot, usually from a “pilot” project that turns into more and needs to fall under enterprise configuration guidelines. 

About half the problems I see with installs / re-configurations end up relating back to the accounts not set up properly for the tiers so please check the install guide to make sure your service accounts have the correct rights before you do this next step. Changing the accounts in TFS 2010 is relatively simple and the instructions are located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552178.aspx

You can either use the GUI or the command line TFSConfig. Instructions for both are located at that MSDN link. I summarized the TFSConfig instructions here:

To use the TFSConfig utility to change the service account

1. On the application-tier server, open a Command Prompt window and change directories to the directory that contains the TFSConfig utility.

   By default, this utility is located in Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools.

2. At the command line, type:
   TFSConfig Accounts /change /accountType:ApplicationTier
   /account:AccountName /password:NewPassword, and then press ENTER.

I recently got a question on this and it seemed useful enough for a post to my blog.  They installed TFS without initially integrating with SharePoint. They had many projects that don't contain SharePoint portals. Then they integrated SharePoint with TFS and can only set up a SharePoint portal with new projects created. Is there any way to create a SharePoint portal for existing TFS projects? Are there any workarounds to achieve this goal?

The answer is yes and yes, and there are a few options to get this done:

Depending on how many you have to do there are two basic approaches that I've used. To begin you need to be in the Project Administrators group or have the View Collection-Level Information and Edit Collection-Level Information permissions set to Allow.

Manual Method, good if you just have a few. Follow the instructions one MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd386320.aspx . Basic steps are:

1.In Team Explorer, right-click the name of the project, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Portal Settings.
2.On the Project Portal tab, select the Enable project portal check box.
3.Click Use this SharePoint site, and then click Configure URL.
4.In the Web application list, click a SharePoint Web application.
5.In Relative site path, type the relative path of an existing SharePoint site.As you type the path, it appears at the end of the value in URL.
6.In URL, click the link, verify that the path is correct, and then click OK.
7.If you want this SharePoint site to show data for this project, select the Reports and dashboards refer to data for this team project check box.
8.Click OK.

Scripting with File.BatchNewTeamProject, more complex but creates the reports as well and good if you have a bunch to do at once. I did a few hundred in fairly short order using this method. Follow the detailed steps here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff462695.aspx .

It would be great is TFS had a nice Web Service to do this, logged to the event log, etc, and there is some additional logging you can turn on but I've always found this a pain. One thing you can do (especially if you know what you are looking at for commands that suspect have been run) is the tbl_command table in the Collection DB. For instance if you suspect a witadmin command has been run you can use something like this SQL query:

   1:  select * from tbl_Command with (nolock) 

   2:  where useragent LIKE 'Team Foundation (witadmin.exe%'

The usual precautions would apply here, like not running direct DB queries durring peak production times etc. but it allows you to quicly see a list of whats been run against TFS. The Command column has a record of the command that was run. When I had an issue at client of someone running unauthorized commands I was able to use this to track down the person quickly.

I responded to a post recently on one of the MSDN TFS forums regarding a question from a user trying to upgrade from Team Foundation Server 2008 to Team Foundation Server 2010.  His question was related to trying to do a delta DB copy after an initial successful upgrade to try and speed the process (it can take 8 hours or more for the full upgrade). (see tfs 2010 re-upgrade)

There is no supported way to achieve this, but it also made me recall another very important tip:  Shut down ALL TFS related services and app pools before making your TFS 2008 DB backups to move to your new server (I’m assuming you are migrating to different hardware in this case).  

This ensures everything is in sync for the backup.  If you don’t, there is a chance a record in one of the DB’s could be updated before you have a chance to complete the backup.  I’ve seen the results of this first hand and it was both difficult to diagnose and expensive.  Your upgrade will proceed normally and you wont know there is a problem until you try and create a new team project, or create a new work item.