I have been an avid consumer of the ALM Rangers artifacts, articles and applications for a long time now.
Who are the Rangers:
“The Visual Studio ALM Rangers accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for feature gaps and value-add guidance for the ALM community.”
Some of the cool “stuff” that you should have seen before:
And finally I will be on the other side of the fence
I have had a couple people asking me “where are the build templates in TFS 2013?”.
Well they have been removed!
Don’t worry, they are still available though 
By default, they are now simply stored in TFS and not in the repository.
When creating a build definition you will notice that the default build templates can simply be selected (as per usual).
When you need to use a custom template, or modify the existing templates you can simple download the template,
make your changes and then upload the updated build template to the repository as per normal.
Microsoft has reworked things in the build templates, simplifying it quite a lot. Hopefully altering your build processes will no longer be such a daunting task!
Finally! It felt really odd not having the trusted power tools available when working in VS / TFS 2013 
Some big news!! The release candidate for VS & TFS 2013 was released last night.
There are a couple of really nice features added since the preview. One of my favourites is the charting ability for work items. I have done quite a few custom TFS reports, and even though this may reduce the number of jobs that I have, it is VERY cool nonetheless…
The list of things that have been added is fairly large, hopefully I will blog about it in the future.
Note that this does have a “go-live” license, so Microsoft will provide support if you decide to be an early adopter and upgrade your production environments.
Feel free to contact us if you need more information around upgrade options...
I finally got the time to go and write the “Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management” exam.
I was quite nervous about this one, as it has been a while since I have written any form of exam and because it is very “non technical” focussed. These “fuzzy” questions can often be very misleading.
Luckily I passed, fairly well actually, so I thought I would jot down some of my crib notes..
Especially the terminology and the artefacts that are included in the different process templates. The questions are almost a matter of disqualifying the incorrect answers and then you are left with what can only be the correct ones.
Especially scrum! The scrum guide is a fairly concise guide and small enough to read in one sitting (even for me!), so there is no real reason not to work through it in any case.
Once again, have a good grasp of the CMMI, Agile and Scrum terminology, artefacts and processes.
I really recommend “Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012” by Richard Hundhausen. Even if you are not going to take the exam, a very good read indeed.
Have a look online, there are a lot of brain dumps available for this exam. I would take a look at the questions, but really scrutinise the answers. I looked over a couple and there are definitely plenty of wrong answers provided to the questions. Just be careful and don't learn the answers of by heart!
Yes, there is actually a free jumpstart for this exam. Definitely worth spending some time on.
Done and dusted!
Good luck if you are going to give it a go.
Let me give you a hint: Not only is it faster, it’s also more reliable! (There, blog post done : )
Let me expand on the above:
It’s fast!
Seriously, a lot faster.
Anybody that’s ever had to sit and pay VSS tax while dreaming of your post work beer, waiting for a history lookup, a search, or especially “View difference” would know what I mean.
There is a great difference in architecture between the two. I’ll discuss a few to give you an idea of why you should consider moving.
Storage:
TFS Uses a SQL database to store Team Project Collections; VSS uses a File System. So how is this better?
· Size – (Yes it does matter) VSS can store up to 4GB reliably; TFS can go into Terabytes
· Reliable – Ever had a network error when checking in on VSS? You’re left with corrupt files and a caffeine overdose. TFS commits a transaction which can be rolled back if there is an error
· Indexing on the tables so faster searches – Did I mention TFS is faster?
· And of course, having a DB as your data store, you can have all the usual goodies like mirrored and clustered DB’s for TFS, so you never have to lose anything or have any down time!
Networking:
TFS uses HTTP services vs. file shares (That should be enough said)
· Option of a TFS proxy for remote sites to save bandwidth and speed things up a little
· Did I mention that TFS is faster?
Security:
TFS uses Windows Role-Based Security vs. VSS security (I don’t think the methodology was good enough for someone to even come up with a name for it – I’ll just call it Stup-Id, there we go, you’re welcome ;)
Windows Role-Based Security vs. VSS’s Stup-Id:
· With Win Roles you can specify who’s allowed to view, check-out, check-in and lots more. With Stup-Id you can set rights per project, but all users must have the same rights for the database folder. This means all users can access and completely muck up the shared folders. Not pretty.
Extra functionality and pure awesomeness:
· Shelve sets – this is really handy to store code if you don’t want to commit it just yet. Say you go for lunch and you’re afraid that BigDog might chew up your hard drive again: all you do is shelve your code – this stores it in TFS. Once you’ve replaced said eaten hard drive you just unshelve and... tada! No need to say the dog ate my homework.
· Code review – Developer A can request a code review from another developer who can add comments to the code and send it back. (Basically sharing a shelve set)
· Gated check-ins: You can set rules to only allow check-ins when certain conditions have been met. For example, only check in code when:
o the code builds successfully, or
o all unit tests have passed, or
o the code has been reviewed
· Work Items – Bug/issue tracking made with love removes that nagging feeling at the back of your mind that one of these days there will be a PHP or MySQL update that breaks your free open source ticketing/bug tracking system.
· Change sets – basically all the items that you’ve changed and are checking in. You can also associate change sets with work items for better issue tracking.
· Build automation – automate build and deploys (How cool is this?)
But for me the Pièce de résistance is:
Have you ever had a new developer change files outside of the IDE? Maybe change the read-only attribute and made some changes? This completely confuses VSS and is a great way to get your source control out of sync. In TFS you can edit files outside of the IDE to hearts content and TFS will pick it up and queue for the next commit.
How to move?
Google “Visual Source Safe Upgrade Tool for Team Foundation Server” and follow the instructions.
And that is why TFS will make you happy. Better source control means better code quality, leading to happy customers, and maybe being the next Bill Gates (unless you wanted to be Guy Fawkes).
Welcome Dawie...the TFS Apprentice
Having joined TFC at the beginning of July 2013, Dawie Snyman has the un-enviable challenge of having to become an expert in all things ALM and TFS.
Like many of my clients, TFS is completely foreign to him!
Dawie will be contributing to our blog, offering up a new perspective on TFS... that of the 'first time user'.
Looking forward to his insights…
See his first post over here..
