Merge Team Projects into one in TFS
In TFS 2012 the product team introduced the concept of Teams into TFS. Before this many organisations created multiple Team Projects and now want to merge Team Projects into one, or at least fewer. There are many reasons you might have done this in the past but there is no reason to live with this.
Maven release perform tries to do a Get to a workspace sub folder in TFS
If you are using TFS and specifically switching from SVN to TFS then you might run into the issue that your Maven release perform tries to do a Get to a workspace sub folder. This will not work as TFS has a validation exception to trying to map a sub folder inside an existing workspace. That could be disastrous in a real situation.
Avoid the pick-n-mix branching anti-pattern
For the last few days I have been working with a customer in the UK on a grass roots engagement to help them solve their source control issues. They have ended up with a pick-n-mix branching anti-pattern and could not see the way out.
The value of an independent Scotland for me
For the last wee while some of you may have noticed some news coverage about Scottish independence. This post is about the value of an independent Scotland for me, so if you are not interested in politics then move along. It will all be over in a few months and you will likely never have to hear about it outside of history again.
Maven release prepare fails with detected changes in Jenkins
If you are using Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 or 2013 your Maven release prepare fails with detected changes, however it worked when you were using SVN. As you may have noticed I have had a few posts on Jenkins integration with TFS recently. My current customer is migrating away from SVN and Jenkins to TFS 2012 to take advantage of the cool ALM feature however we need to stage in, taking one thing at a time. They have quite a few builds in Jenkins and moving them will take time. The idea is that we can move all of the source over and it is a fairly simple process to re-point Jenkins and Maven to TFS. This allows the teams to take advantage of relating their Source and Work Item while allowing us to create parallel builds and validate the output.
Traveling for work and the Dell Venue 8
I travel a lot and I have been carting around both a Surface 2 Pro and a Surface 2 on my travels. I have been feeling recently that this was a little silly and I wanted to reduce my load and increase my flexibility. So just last week I purchased a Dell Venue 8.
How to delete work items from TFS or VSO
Have you ever created a bunch of work items that you decided later that you had to delete. Well I have… especially as a user of the TFS Integration Platform. And when things go wrong there they can really go wrong.
Run a router on Hyper-V
I want to run a router on Hyper-V so that I can run many VM’s, each with internet access, on corporate and hotel networks. Microsoft touts Routing and Remote Access but there is no way I will go there. First it’s a total pain to setup and run. Second I need to run a whole Windows Server just to have basic DHCP and internet access. Overkill much! There must be a better way.
Getting a service account for VSO with TFS Service Credential Viewer
Have you tried to get a service account for Visual Studio Online (VSO)? Did you know that you can use the TFS Service Credential Viewer to get it. When you join a local or azure build server to your VSO account you are asked to log in with an account that is an administrator to get credentials. However it cant continue to use your credentials as your Microsoft ID token expires after 2 days and you would have to login again. Not a good experience. However there is a little bit of code that the build server uses to get a basic service username and password that it uses instead. I have used this to create unit tests that hit the TFS API’s in VSO as well as do all sorts of automated tasks that I need.
TFS Process Template migration script updated
Did you know that you can quite easily to do a TFS process template migration? Did you notice I used the “quite” in there. Well if you think of the Process Template as the blueprints then the Team Project that you create is the concrete instance of that blueprint.
