TFS 2015 Update 1 RC

In case you have not noticed RC 1 for the first update to on-premise TFS 2015 is in release candidate.

Amongst others, my favourite new bits are:

1. Dashboards
2. Card colouring

Yours?

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ALM Byte Sized Session: Database as source wrap-up

I must admit, it was a very interesting session we had on managing databases last week.

Thank you again to Riaan and Roelof from Capfin, who took the time to show us what they have achieved, what they are using and where their problems are.

Some interesting question were posed and here is some feedback on the questions that we did not have a hope of answering on the spot:

Q) Is there any way to use something like Application Insights to trace database code?
A) As far as I can see not much to trace the code in a stored procedure or function. What is possible is something called "Dependency Tracker" that will track how long these calls to external systems (services calls, database calls etc.) take.

Q) How can we show Code Coverage in the new SonarQube C# plugin?
A) It seems you simply have to run the code coverage tool of choice and then import the code coverage result file as part of the runner settings. See this for more detail

Q) What is the table count limit in SQL?
A) Some useless information of the day: The sum of the number of objects (including objects such as tables, views, stored procedures, user-defined functions, triggers, rules, defaults, and constraints) in a database cannot exceed 2,147,483,647. (Cutting it close there Riaan )

I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did, and hope to see you at the next and final session for the year  http://bit.ly/almdays where we will look at technical debt analysis and some new extensibility features in TFS 2015

ALM days 2015 - Byte sized sessions : Database as source

I often see that the database does not get the love from developers that they give their code. One big topic is always around the tooling and how expensive some of the database management tools are.

Well this session will hopefully give you some insight into the "free" tools that are available and built into the Visual Studio ALM stack.

Interested in how to manage database schemas / source and to discuss some of the scars that one of my client is in the process of picking up?

Our next session is on 17th of September 2015 at the Microsoft Offices in Pinelands. Feel free to register here : http://bit.ly/almdaysSept15 
(and invite anyone you think may be interested!)

Edit: We apologise, but Microsoft has scheduled Dev Days Cape Town on the 17th as well. Due to this conflict we a re-scheduling to the 1st of October 2015. We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

Thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring the venue for this session.

TFS 2015 Finally released!

After waiting what seems like forever, TFS 2015 has finally been released after Brian Harry decided to hold back and get some more testing done.

This time it seems to be the real thing : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2015/08/06/team-foundation-server-2015-final-release.aspx

I've had some people ask me if they should upgrade or wait a while to have all the "kinks" worked out. My answer is twofold:

1. Evaluate the release first and make sure that there is value to be had out of the upgrade
2. Secondly, I would not worry toooo much about encountering any "kinks". TFS is pretty much production tested in VSO so there is not much of a chance that you will encounter any significant issues

If it makes sense for you to upgrade, by all means do (of course taking necessary precautions as you would in any upgrade situation!).

That said, it is always a good idea to keep up to date with updates and upgrades. This will make future updates less cumbersome and quicker, as well as keep you in the support band (TFS 2010 is not supported anymore and Visual Source Safe should not exist anymore!! (even though the tragic truth is I'm still doing the odd VSS migration ))

It should be noted that this will probably be a longer update/upgrade than most. There are some significant database changes due to the project rename (finally!) capability that was added. In most small TSF instances this will not be much of an issue, but I have dealt with some large instances that needed careful planning! Luckily there are ways and means to make it a bit easier.

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Visual Studio 2015 RTM on July 20th

woohoo.. finally the RTM date for Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio 2015 has been made public…

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2015/06/29/save-the-date-visual-studio-2015-rtm-on-july-20th.aspx

Edit: Visual Studio will be released, but Brian has decided that quality is more important than timelines.. So we will have to wait a bit longer for TFS 2015 to land, but be assured the quality will be right up there

Need help upgrading ? : give us a shout

Installing and configuring TFS 2015 on-premise xplat build agent

One of the things that really got me exited about TFS 2015 was the cross platform build capability, and that was the first thing that I started to play with as soon as I got hold of the RC.

Interestingly enough, in VSO it is fairly easy to setup when you have the "alternate credentials" on VSO, but, as I was to discover, there are a few more things that you need to do before you can get it working on-prem.

So with my TFS server and newly installed Ubuntu box ready, I started the xplat (pronounced "cross plat(form)" if you were wondering) configuration. The install was fairly straight forward as per the steps indicated. Then came the configuration.

1) Authentication
The first thing the vsoagent configuration asks for is an account to run the xplat agent under. Linux does not play well in an Active Directory environment, and I have spent waaayy to much of my life trying to get linux working on AD. This hinted towards authentication problems…
But there is a Solution
VSO has the concept of alternate credentials, which is basically a "Basic Authentication" mechanism. What we need to do on-prem is to enable this type of behaviour.

1. Log onto your TFS Server and install Basic auth on IIS 
2. Go to the TFS application in IIS (Sites\Team Foundation Server\tfs) and enable basic auth
3. Edit and set the domain and realm to the domain used for authentication

2) Security
Once you have the authentication mechanisms setup you need to pick the account that the agent is going to run under and assign the correct rights in TFS and in the build pool. To set the rights for the build pool you need to

1. Navigate to TFS server web access admin screen (http://<<server>>:8080/tfs/_admin)
2. Go to the "Agent Pools" tab and either create a new pool or select the default pool
3. Then assign the account that the agent is going to run under into the "Agent Pool Service Account"

Not doing this may give you a "Failed Request: Forbidden (403)" error when you try and run the agent

3) Boot her up…
Finally you need to "boot her up". If you have followed the steps outlined here, you should be able to run "node vsoagent" in the agent folder of the newly "installed" agent and you should see something like this beauty..

and in TFS :

and "thar she blows"..

Please note that it… .. use at own risk

TFS 2015 RC & VS 2015 RC announcements at //BUILD/

As expected there is a bunch of stuff being announced at //BUILD/.

Catch some of the highlights of TFS & VS 2015 from Brian's post and for a more comprehensive list of changes and features go here

Time to play