Martin Hinshelwood's ALM Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Are you doing Scrum? Find out with a Scrum Health Check!

Martin Hinshelwood — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 11:35:26 -0000

:) Contact through the email on the image or http://www.nwcadence.com/Healt...

Re: Are you doing Scrum? Find out with a Scrum Health Check!

Ilias Tsagklis — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:11:29 -0000

Hi Martin,

Awesome blog! Is there an email address I can contact you in private?

Re: TFS Event Handler for Team Foundation Server 2010

Martin Hinshelwood — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:12:25 -0000

Why would you say that it is dead? Works with 2005, 2008 and 2010 currently and many of these features are built into Visual Studio 11...

Re: TFS Event Handler for Team Foundation Server 2010

Dominick Meglio — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:19:34 -0000

Is TFS Event Handler officially dead? I really need a good tool to automate emailing...

Re: Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

Michael Delaney — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:31:23 -0000

I attempted this step by step. I have an existing TFS instance on a Server 2008 R2 install that already had SharePoint 3.0 integration. I have installed a new SharePoint 2010 instance on another 2008 R2 server. I am trying to serve the project portal for my existing TFS collections on the new SP2010 server. I am missing something here. How do i move the existing project collection portal to the new SP2010 server? The original administrator has since left the group and had no documentation.

Do I need to export the database from the sql server on the original TFS machine to the new portal machine? The new machine has SS 2008 R2 on it as the DB server too. Any advice or step by step guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Re: Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:07:37 -0000

You do not get ANY Excel dashboards unless you use Enterprise. You do however still get the Reporting Services ones.

I could not find a good reference either...

Re: Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

Jon Mozley — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:22:10 -0000

I've been absolutely baffled by the Microsoft documentation for all this - information overload! Thank you for very clear set of instructions and screenshots.

Re: Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

Dean Gross — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:22:51 -0000

I am trying to find a comparsion of what TFS dashboards we would get when integrating with SP 2010 Standard vs SP 2010 Enterprise but have not been able to find anything specific. Do you know where i might be able to find this information? I need to confince some people that the Enterprise version is worth the extra money.

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

Martin Hinshelwood — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:34:05 -0000

In order to not have to change all of the queries in "Current" then you should create the following:

..\Release 1\Current\Sprint 1
..\Release 1\Sprint 2
..\Release 1\Sprint n

Change all of your queries to point to "Under" "..\Release 1\Current" which will automatically include "Sprint 1".
When you move to "Sprint 2" just move "Sprint 1" out of "Current" and move "Sprint 2" under "Current".

Simples....

Re: Visual Studio 2010 Overview – Microsoft Test Manager

Martin Hinshelwood — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:24:22 -0000

Its amasing, even uploading a download from videopress is better quality!

Re: Visual Studio 2010 Overview – Introduction

Martin Hinshelwood — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:07:20 -0000

I updated with better video quality VS2010 from 1000 feet!

Re: Visual Studio 2010 Overview – A day in the life of … Plan, Code & Test

Martin Hinshelwood — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:10:42 -0000

@100r I have fixed the video quality problems...by moving from Videopress to Screencast.com

Re: Visual Studio 2010 Overview – A day in the life of … Plan, Code & Test

Martin Hinshelwood — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:02:46 -0000

There is a video quality issue with this session and I managed to pull the original back out. I will re-process it today and get the current video replaced... Thanks
@100r for pointing it out...

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

MARKUS POEHLER — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:43:48 -0000

"Instead have a single “Current” folder that has queries that point to the current iteration. Just change the queries as you move from one iteration to another."

What exactly does this mean? As soon I move on to the next iteration, the Current Folder holds all items assigned to the Iteration "cutrrent", what to do then? Rename the iteration and reassign all items as well? Should it be this work intensive...? What is best practice here?

Re: What is the roll of the Project Manager in Scrum?

Martin Hinshelwood — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:33:52 -0000

Are Project Managers Living A Lie? http://agilescout.com/are-proj... I found this very profound and I just wondered how accurate it is! If so I would make it part of my "Customer introduction Pack".

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:42:52 -0000

I still advocate for a Project of Projects with the upcoming TFS11, Dev11 and TFS Service (TFS Azure)

Re: Upgrading from TFS 2008 and WSS v3.0 with SfTSv2 to TFS 2010 and SF 2010 with SfTSv3

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:38:50 -0000

I have three answers for you:
>>1. Did you install template and/or manually setup IIS vdir and SOAP listener?
I did the install.

>>2. How did you migrate work item attachments?

In this case my customer did not have any attachments. they used Links to SharePoint documents. You could write something against the API to move all of your attachments to SharePoint, or to export them prior to the destroy and reattach them afterwords.

>>3. After work item destroy, did you reseed work item numbers to start from zero?

DO NOT EVEN TRY THIS. It will render your TFS instance "unserviceable".

I hope that answers some of your questions...

Re: TFS vs. Subversion fact check

Martin Hinshelwood — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:26:36 -0000

You are right, there is no built in code sharing in TFS. This was deliberately left out of the product as it is always a bad idea to share code between products at the source level.

Related Discussion: http://blog.hinshelwood.com/pr...

I favour using an internally hosted (or hosted) NuGet server to store and distribute binaries/packages of reusable/shared features.

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

stian.danielsen — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:44:59 -0000

Thanks a lot, Martin!

I think we are leaning towards a product-focused structure, avoiding putting in TeamName.

So, the areas will look like:
ProductFamily\Product\Feature

...and the iterations will look like:
ProductFamily\Product\Feature\Release\Sprint

Feature would be a new version, maintenance, a new gui etc.

I think this setup will work very well for us - with the benefits of having all within the same Team Project.

With the upcoming TFS 11 in mind, would you still advocate keeping all in the same Team Project?

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

Martin Hinshelwood — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:44:47 -0000

Well it depends :) If all of your teams are on the same cadence then use Area\Product\Team, but if they are on different cadences you should use Iteration\Product\Release\Team\Sprint or
Iteration\Product
\Team \Release\Sprint. In DEV11 this problem goes away as it has the idea of teams built in. Ho, another option would be to put a drop-down-list on your PBI for team...

All options suck... fixed in dev11

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

stian.danielsen — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:05:46 -0000

Hi there Martin and thanks for your insightful post!

In my company we have 10+ different products and developer teams and are now reevaluating how to best organize it all in TFS.

Here is a question for you:
We would like to use a single Team Project and separate the products using Areas. In some cases, several teams do development on the same product.
How would you resolve this so that each teams work items don't get mixed up with other teams working on the same product (each team has different releases/iterations)?

This is the structure we initially go for in Areas:
<teamproject><productname>

...considering multiple teams working on the same product we could maybe structure it like this:
<teamproject><productname><teamname>

What do you think of that?

Alternatively, we could lump everything into <teamproject><productname> and then separate stuff using Iterations...so the Iterations structure would look like this:

<teamproject><productname><teamname><release><sprint>

Which solution would you suggest?</sprint></release></teamname></productname></teamproject></productname></teamproject></teamname></productname></teamproject></productname></teamproject>

Re: TFS Error: MSB4018 The "BuildShadowTask" task failed unexpectedly

thohan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:07:19 -0000

This helped, many thanks! It's always nice when someone else goes through some pain and posts about it so others like myself don't have to suffer.

Re: Should GeeksWithBlogs move to the WordPress Platform?

Martin Hinshelwood — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:16:47 -0000

How to move from GeeksWithBlogs to Wordpress?
http://gwbtowp.codeplex.com/ I have code for that!

Re: Allow user to change the region for Windows Live ID billing

Martin Hinshelwood — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:11:24 -0000

The Live ID Billing problem has been solved for TFS Service (TFS Azure)...

Re: Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

davidkallen — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:41:08 -0000

Thanks for the detailed scenario, Martin. I have shared code libraries between two applications before and it was not so bad as you describe. Yes, occasionally, we might make an improvement to serve one solution, and that would break the other solution. But our CI builds found that pretty quickly. Then the affected team could adjust their software to utilize the newer, better version. The alternative would be for the other team to take a frozen copy of our DLL and periodically update it on a schedule that fits their convenience. Then, if we had made breaking changes, they could deal with them at the time of their choice instead of being forced to deal with it when we made the breaking change.

It does not seem to me that one approach is inherently right and the other wrong. Rather, I see tradeoffs. By sharing source code, we were forcing the other team to integrate to our changes as quickly as possible. If they used DLLs, then they might forget or neglect to update all external dependencies and deploy software with older versions of software with known defects, even though our latest version was up-to-date. Yet I can see the value in the approach you advocate. To me it depends on the context. My context is an enterprise application with two solutions that should be kept integrated with the very latest stuff when they deploy. Any annoyance they encounter during changes is a sign of early integration and well worth it. But I can certainly imagine scenarios when I might adopt another approach. I will try to keep an open mind on this in the future to ensure that we make a deliberate choice one way or the other, for a good reason, rather than just assuming that one way is always the best. But that is as far as I am ready to go at this time. I am not yet ready to say I will NEVER share source code libraries among solutions.

Oh, and I almost forgot to thank you for this post. It is one of the most valuable posts I have seen for a TFS team.