This is a super basic and easy question, but I found quite often people asking me how to add an existing project to a TFS Team Project. It turns out that there are more than one way of doing this, but I usually suggests this simple path that is quite simple and is understandable from people that comes from the subversion world.

First of all be sure that you have a valid workspace in your computer that maps the folder in the Team Project where you want to put your existing project and issue a GetLatest. If the team project is new you can simply create a workspace going to menu File –> source control –> Workspaces, press add and create a workspace that maps the source to a folder on your pc.

Figure 1: Creating a workspace that maps the whole folder of the source control.

Now simply go to the local folder and move the existing solution from the original location to the mapped folder, then go to the Team Explorer –> Source control and manually add all the files to Tfs Source Control. In Figure2 I represented the process to accomplish this task, first of all select Source Control, press the add button then Visual Studio presents you all the files that are in your local folder but are not present in the source control (they are the candidate to be added to the source control).

Figure 2: Adding existing file to source control

Now you are presented with a list of all the files that will be added to TFS source control, as seen in figure 3

Figure 3: List of files that gets added to the source control.

As you can see some of the files are excluded (22 in Figure 3), this happens because Visual Studio already knows that certain types of file should be excluded from source control, like all the Bin and Debug folders and all *.dll files. If you have some lib folder where you store third party library, you can go to the Excluded Items tab in Figure 3 to add manually all the excluded files you want to be added to the source control. Since this window is usually cluttered with all the bin and obj directory, I found simpler to:

1. 1) in a first pass add all the file suggested by Visual Studio
2. 2) browse to lib directory (or whatever folder contains third party library) and add explicitly all the files in the directory.

Now all files were in Pending-add, this means that they will be sent to the source control with a  check-in, but before the check-in phase you should open solution file from the source control explorer windows. After the solution is opened Visual studio should tell you that this solution is in a source control monitored folder, but source control is not enabled

This basically means that, source files are correctly linked to the source control system, but the Visual Studio integration is not enabled, you can simply press Yes and let Visual Studio actually do binding between projects and source control.

If the binding does not happens automatically you will get the windows of Figure 4, (you can always open this windows with the menu File –> Source Control –> Change Source control. In this window you can simply select one project at a time and press the Bind button to perform the bind, until all the project files are in Connected Status.

Figure 4: Binding windows where you can bind solution and projects file to TFS

Now you can check-in everything and usually you should create another workspace or ask to another member of the team to do a get-latest of the just-inserted solution, to verify that all the needed files were correctly added to the source control.

Gian Maria.

The search box functionality was introduced with the August release, but I see that some people still does not know it. This question arose during a talk about how to handle the lifecycle of a bug, and when it was time to deal with the “avoid duplication” issue, people told me that they want a simple way to search work item by text, because this is the fastest way to verify if a bug has some duplicate.

Basically the needs you have during search for duplicates is to be able to do a free text search inside title and description to Work Item and a quick way to create duplicate candidate lists, that you need to share with testers and others to verify that they really are duplicates.

The search feature was present in the web interface since the first RTM of TFS 2010, but it is quite often overlooked, because not every person uses the web interface. All you need to do is browse to your Web Interface page (ex. http://localhost:8080/tfs/web/I) you can notice a nice TextBox to search in Work Items.

Figure 1: Search functionality inside the Team Web Access application

But if you have latest power tools installed, you can search directly from Visual Studio, just be sure that you are visualizing the Work Item Tracking toolbar and you should see a nice texbox where you can simply type something and press enter to search.

Figure 2: The new free text search textbox added with TFS Power Tools

Clearly this is really easier and faster than using the web interface. In the December 2011 update you  can use to open a Work Item by Id, simply press the Id and press enter and Visual Studio immediately opens the corresponding work item.

Figure 3: Just type the id and press enter to edit a work item if you know the id.

Do not forget that you can always Right-Click the Work Item and choose “Copy Work Item Shortcut”, this is an extremely useful function if you want to give people not used to Visual Studio the ability to quick edit a work item, just give them the link, and if they have permission, they can view/edit the WO directly from the web.

Figure 4: A link to a work item is a Url that points to the edit view of the Work Item.

This functionality is useful during bug duplication to quick build a series of possible duplicate bug list that is usable from every person in the team that has access to the Web. If you look at the documentation of the Work Item Search Functionality, you can notice that you can even specify complex filter, like “cart T=Bug” that basically search the term cart only in work item Type = Bug.

Figure 5: You can issue complex query to the work item search.

Now suppose the search returns a bunch of Bugs, you can select those one that you believe are duplicates, and then simply Right-Click and choose to “copy Work Item Shortcut” to quick create a list of duplicates, or you can open all those Work Item in project or Excel, or send to Outlook because maybe you need to email to the test team, asking them if that group of Bug are really duplicated.

Figure 6: You can create a mail with a single click that contains all selected Work Items.

You can see that the Ids are clickable and as you can suspect, each link opens the related work item in the Team Web Access web site. Armed with all these possibilities, searching and reviewing list of possible duplicated bug is really easier.

Gian Maria.

You can read all the details Here, but basically it is a release mainly focused for “non visual studio developers”. This new release has a MSSCCI provider for 64 bit, and a version of Power Tools for eclipse, and it is available from the Eclipse update site.

For those ones interested in knowing the news for VS Power Tools, basically it add the capability to search for number in the “Work Item Search Box” and a bunch of rules in the Best Practice Analyzer to identify issues with Project Server interaction, so, for Visual Studio Users it is a minor release, and probably the last for Visual Studio 2010, as stated by Brian

Right now, I’m thinking this will be the last Power Tools release for the VS 2010 wave of products.  After the new year, we are going to turn our attention to getting all of the Power Tools working seamlessly with VS/TFS 11 (and removing all the ones that have now been added to the product

Happy TFS.

Gian Maria.

One of the great advantage of using Tfs on Azure, called Team Foundation Service, is that you never should worry for update of the server, because everything is managed by the TFS team. If you already have an account, you probably noticed that the UI is radically changed, as described in Brian Harry’s post, new features were added, a new UI is available and everything was done without any need for you intervention.

Another advantage of this approach, is that we can benefit from regular updates of TFS, instead of waiting for 2 years before the next release is available. As Brian stated

We are now trying to transition our “major” update cycle to monthly.  I won’t promise that we’ll have major new features every month but we’re going to try to move to a cadence where we have new features show up in more months than not.

This is really cool and is another great advantage of using Team Foundation Service. In this new release, alerts were introduced:

Figure 1: The alert control panel.

The alerting system is something that is available in TFS from long time, but it was not available on the Team Foundation Service until this release, mainly because it needs a complete new Web Interface to manage alters. (Actually in TFS 2010 you can manage alerts from Visual Studio). As an example, this is the interface that permits you to add an alert whenever someone do a check-in in the project.

Figure 2: All possible check-in alert available in Team foundation Service

The cool part is that everything is done from a Web Interface that is fast, fluid and really efficient, when you select a check-in rule (in figure2 I choose to have an alert when any checkin occurs) another dialog permits me to refine the alert.

Figure 3: Check-in alert rule dialog.

As you can see, setting an alert on checkin is matter of few clicks. Clearly you can setup alerts for Work Items modification, for Builds and for Code Reviews (a new feature of next version of VS+TFS).

If you did not subscribe yet to this preview, check Brian’s post with a new invitation code (TfsDecUpdate), you can find details here.

Gian Maria.

Shelvesets are a really useful concept in TFS, and you should be aware that thanks to Power Tools you can even do a Merge during an Unshelve in case of conflicts. As an example suppose this simple and stupid scenario, you have this code.

Figure 1: Original Code

Now lets generate a conflict with Shelveset; simply typing some text.

Figure 2: Modified code, insertion of a simple comment.

I’ve simply typed some comment into the class, now Shelve the file without preserving pending changes, the file reverts to the code in Figure 1, now modify again the comment of the class as shown in Figure 3       

Figure 3: Another modification done to the class, this modification conflicts with the version in Figure 2.

Now check-in and commit this code (this simulates the situation when you need to suspend with shelve the work you are doing to accomplish higher priority task), then unshelve the previous shelveset, as you can verify the code revert to that one shown in Figure 2, and you lose the modification of the last check-in. This happens because the unshelve operation does not trigger a merge in case of conflicts. If you looks at the output windows you should find a message telling you that a newer version exists in source control as shown in Figure 4

Figure 4: A warning by the source control, a newer version of the file exists.

Now you should simply reissue a Get Latest command and TFS will present you a list of all conflicts that originates from the unshelving operation.

Figure 5: Issuing a Get Latest will trigger the conflict windows that shows each file that conflicted after the unshelve operation.

This is a situation where you have a simple conflict when a file that got in the shelveset was modified and checked-in after the shelve operation, you can merge with the tool of choiche, accept both the comment and check-in, to proceed to the next example. The situation of the file is now represented in Figure 6 and this is the starting point of another example of merging shelvesets when a conflict happen between two users

Figure 6: Both comment where accepted during the merge.

Another type of conflict arise from unshelving conflicting code from another developer. Suppose Dev A and Dev B start both from the code in figure 6, Dev A types a third line of comment telling “third comment line” and shelve the code. At the very same time Dev B does a conflicting modification, typing a third line of code that states “conflicting third comment line” and after this modification, she receives a call from Dev A that asks to review his shelveset. If Dev B try to unshelve the shelveset from Dev A she got the error in Figure 7

Figure 7: It is not possible to unshelve because of conflicts.

This happens because the standard unshelve operation does not permits to handle conflicts, if Visual Studio unshelve a conflicting file from Dev A, all the modification pending from Dev B will be lost. This is an annoying situation that you can solve with Power Tools.

If Dev B want to merge the code in the shelve of Dev A with her current code, she should open a Visual Studio Command prompt, move to the workspace where the project resides, then issue a tfpt.exe unshelve command directly from command line. The command line utility will open the same UI to unshelve that you got in Visual Studio, but now, when she browse to the shelvesets of Dev A and try to unshelve, she got a nice windows that shows all conflicts.

Figure 8: Tfpt.exe unshelve presents you a list of all conflicts that occurred during the unshelve operation

Now you can try automerge, and if it fails, you can press the “Resolve” button (or you can directly go for the “resolve” button without try automerge if you do not like to automerge conflicts

Figure 9: Resolve conflict during unshelve.

In Figure 9 you can see how to ask for a manual merge. Pressing OK Will open the standard tool for merging, you can now do a manual merge and save the result of the merging. Taaadaaaa, thanks to Power Tools you are able to unshelve conflicting shelvesets made by other developers.

Now what happens if Dev B want to revert to the original code she has before merging with the shelveset of Dev A? No problem, because the tfpt.exe unshelve command had created a backup shelveset with all the pending changes just before the merging operation, so if you want to dischard all the modification and revert to the same code that you have prior of the unshelve operation, you can issue another tfpt.exe unshelve operation, choose the backup shelveset (it has the same name of the unshelved shelveset with the string _backup appended), and when the Resolve Unshelve Conflict windows appears (Figure 9) you can simply choose to undo my local changes and take the shelved changes, and you are done.

Happy shelving.

Gian Maria.

Brian Keller always does a great work releasing a Demo Machine with all the goodness of VS2010 and TFS2010, really useful for making demo and courses. The only drawback is that this machine expires after 6 months, and if you did some customization on it, or prepared some customized hands-on-lab, you usually need to do everything again with the new machine. (Brian release a new machine updated with the latest tool some days before the expiration of the old machine).

If you have MSDN and all the keys of the various software you can simply insert all of your product codes to avoid expiration of the machine. Apart from inserting a valid windows 2008 key and office key, that is quite simple you need to upgrade SQL Server from the demo version to the full version. To do this, simply mount a valid Sql Server Iso downloaded from your MSDN, go to the "Maintenance” section, then choose an Edition Upgrade and you are done.

When the machine expires your Visual Studio will ask you for a license, but since your Visual Studio Iso from MSDN are pre-pidded (they have serial number included in the iso), the common question is “where I find the Visual Studio product number in MSDN?”. The answer is in this post, just mount the iso in a virtual Dvd-drive, go to the setup folder, look for the setup.sdb file, open it with a text editor and search product key section. The same trick works to extract the Serial number of TFS from MSDN iso.

When you upgraded: operating system, Office, Sql Server (upgraded), TFS and Visual Studio you should be able to continue to use the virtual machine even after the expiring time.

IMPORTANT: Please be aware that you cannot use this machine in production for any reason, inserting your MSDN codes should only be used to continue to use the machine for internal testing, evaluation and demo purpose only.

Gian Maria.

In TFS 11 there are some cool new tools to easy the communication with customers, since the main reason for building software is to satisfy customers and users, at least in agile world, these kind of tools are really valuable in the process. A key point is being able to communicate easily with Stakeholders and have rapid feedback during each sprint to avoid the risk of “implementing the wrong stuff”.

With Visual Studio 11 a cool adding was added to PowerPoint, it permits to create StoryBoarding, a sort of UI sketch to have early feedback from the Users and Stakehoders and to easy the Requirement gathering part of the project. To use it, just install Power Point in a machine with Dev11 installed, then goes to the Visual Studio menu and click on “powerpoint storyboarding”.

The usual question is, we already have Sketchflow, why should we use Powerpoint? In my opinion there are several reasons

• PowerPoint is simple and it is well known by a lot of people
• A lot of people already have it installed on their pc.
• Its purpose is to create storyboard, while sketchflow is more complex and is useful to create interface mockup

Creating a simple sketch for an UI is really simple, just drag and drop some images from the toolbar to some slides, and you are done.

Figure 1: An example of prototype of WP7 UI

This is an example of a simple sketch for a WP7 interface. Actually we have a little library of basic control , but I’m expecting a good series of images and templates for the final version and you can easily create one of your own. The cool part is that: it is PowerPoint, so you can use all its functionalities you already know.

Figure 2: prototype of a Ribbon  based desktop interface.

After you create the StoryBoard, you can simply save it on Sharepoint and pressing the “Storyboard Links” to attach to a related requirement in TFS as you can see in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The storyboard can be attached to User Stories to it becomes part of the requirements

The other new addition is the Feedback Manager Tool that you can find in the Visual Studio 11 menu. It is based on the MTM UI and it is really useful for interactive development. It has an UI similar to Microsoft Test Manager, but it is used mainly to create a feedback item that can be attached to a TFS Work Item.

After you created your storyboards with PowerPoint, you start to implement User Stories in the backlog and at the end of each sprint, you should deliver the new feature to a test server where the stakeholders can verify what has been implemented. It is time for the stakeholders to give us feedback, so they can fire the feedback tool (that you should install on a test machine) and start playing with your software.

The best part of Feedback Manager, is that it is deeply connected with TFS, you can simply open the tool, start using the software, and gather feedback, attaching files, capturing screenshot, even recording audio and video if you want.

Figure 4: Feedback Manager in action, just use the software and insert comment in the tool.

When the feedback is ok, you can simply press the Submit button, give a title to the feedback, add additional comment and the game is done.

Figure 5: A feedback is just a Work Item of type Feedback and can be managed like all other Work Items of the project

Now the feedback is recorded in TFS, you can just assign to someone, link to a backlog item, etc etc. This is a great tool to gather easy and detailed feedback on your software with great easy.

Gian Maria.