Friday 17 November, 2006 (SharePoint | Team System)
I am looking at the steps necessary to move projects between two Team Foundation Servers where both servers have existing projects setup. The lack of information on how to do this on the Internet and forums indicates that this is not something that is easy to accomplish. We have selected the server which we have customized as the target machine and luckily the other server has a default installation of TFS on it so we don’t need to synchronize any of our own customizations.
I found a post on the Team Foundation Server forums which basically says MS will be looking at this but that there is no existing solution.
I also found a listserver mail archive which indicated that source control and work item history may be lost in the transfer.
At the moment I have a couple of working theories depending on what is possible through the extensibility API available at the VSIP site.
The simplest solution
- Manually create the Team Project
- Upload all the documents to SharePoint manually
- Use Work Item Utility, Mark Browns code for work item shallow copy or Excel to copy work items.
- Get the latest version of items in source control, unbind from the server and then check into the new server and rebind.
A complex solution
- Manually create the Team Projects
- Upload all the documents to SharePoint manually
- Adapt Work Item Utility (http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=b29d4456-c4ba-474e-a422-0479471776e1) to copy the history of all items if it is possible.
- Develop a tool (or find one on the internet) that gets every version of all the files in source control and checks them in with their original dates to the new server.
The second solution is better because we would like to keep all the history but I have a feeling that it may be difficult, maybe even impossible to keep history. Buck Hodges has posted a source control API sample and I believe that this could be modified to get existing code history and check it in to a different server. For the history to be persisted in the new server the CreationDate of the PendingChange objects that are checked in would need to be modified and the server would have to trust the date in the pending change from the client over its own date (unlikely). The super complex solution is to run the tools on the server and modify them so that the server’s date and time is changed between each check in to get them to occur at the right point in time! Probably a lot of work...
Wednesday 15 November, 2006 (SharePoint | Team System | Reviews)
I got a question from one of my many readers 
wondering why I didn't think that TeamPlain was right for me. Since this is a topic that I was planning on writing about I put together a list of my gripes! Unfortunately I haven't had time to try out Teamprise yet which is a related technology, but if I ever get around to it I will definitely write about it here too.
Don't get me wrong I think that TeamPlain is a great piece of software, I would really like to be able to use it but I have some issues with it. I work as a consultant on smallish custom development projects (2-10 developers) for clients who are usually not that technically savvy. Projects normally range from a couple of weeks to a year or so (although some are a lot longer). We also work quite a lot off-site and on multiple projects in parallel, so having a web and web service based interface to Team Foundation Server is great for us. Best of all most of the features that we as developers need is built into the product more or less out of the box. The value that TeamPlain could offer us is giving our clients, project managers and general executive types easy access to more parts of TFS than they get through SharePoint.
Problems that I see with TeamPlain for us
- When opening documents via TeamPlain they are not opened via SharePoint and cannot be updated to the SharePoint document library. SharePoint is web based also so we could just have connected to the SharePoint site instead.
- Reports can be accessed via SharePoint just as well as with TeamPlain, ok you don't get the nice looking drop-downs with a list of reports. On the other hand the reports are web based so users can connect to the report server instead.
- The integration with Source Control is read-only so it is only useful for non-developer access to source control. We don't want non-development artifacts stored in source control; they should be stored on the SharePoint site or in the wiki, so we have no use of this feature.
- There is no SharePoint integration, so you have to choose if you go in through SharePoint or the TeamPlain entry point. Since we also have a wiki this means we actually have to choose between three entries instead of having one big Project Dashbord with the status of the entire project and quick access to all areas. We have implemented a quick fix for our wiki by putting it inside a WebPart on the SharePoint site, we could do the same with TeamPlain but I don’t believe that this is optimal.
- There is no API for interacting with or modify TeamPlain nor is it possible to use parts of the TeamPlain GUI in other Web Apps or from within SharePoint. The license explicitly prohibits users from modifying TeamPlain.
Features that would make me look at TeamPlain again
- SharePoint integration so I could give users access to the features in TeamPlain that I want through WebParts. Then each Project could customize their views depending on their specific needs.
- Floating user licensing for the lite edition since we only really need the work item editing capabilities for our clients at the moment.
- Some form of feature customization or extensibility, partly just for the sake of it (I am a developer after all) but also because I believe that customizable products will always be more useful.
Wednesday 15 November, 2006 (.Net | SharePoint | Team System)
Unfortunately it will not be possible to upgrade Team Foundation Server to Windows SharePoint Services 3 when it is released, see Jason Bariles blog for more info. This feature will not be added in the upcoming Service Pack (SP1) either. So for the time being we will all just have to make do with WSS 2 features and add any additional functionality that we need through TFS extensibility and custom SharePoint features. 
Thursday 09 November, 2006 (SharePoint | TechEd 2006 | Team System | Scrum | FlexWiki)
I have been working with Visual Studio Team System since the public Beta came out so the possibility of customizing, reconfiguring and extending Team System was not new for me. Unfortunately I am slightly disappointed with the content of this White Board Discussion since I have been looking forward to hearing how others are implementing Team System, I was expecting more information and tips on actually getting management buy-in and best practices for process adoption. We are in the middle of rolling out Team System for our Microsoft development projects so I know that the real value of Team System can only really be realized when you customize your setup. But at the same time it was good to hear that the work that we are doing thinking about how to customize Team System and our Team Foundation Server setup is what others also are thinking about.
Right now the state of our setup is the following:
- Team Foundation Server setup with SSL over multiple dns names. This was no trivial task since there was no official documentation for setting up TFS with SSL when we did this. Now there is a step-by-step guide on MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms242875.aspx. Additionaly you need to “hack” your IIS and TFS configuration if you want it to work. Perhaps I will get back to this in a future post.
- ScrumForTeamSystem (http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/). Since we have a couple of projects that use Scrum it made sense to have a process template that supports Scrum.
- TeamPlain Web Access (http://www.teamplain.com/). We are still evaluating this and although it works quite well, I am not sure that it is right for our use.
- FlexWiki (http://www.flexwiki.com/). I have come to love Wikis for simplifying and reducing the friction to start writing documentation of our systems. We have integrated FlexWiki into our SharePoint portal sites by simply adding a Page Viewer WebPart with a large height.
- SharePoint hotfix 915746 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915746). Without this hotfix you cannot add new Web Parts to you portal sites.
New features that we are looking at implementing:
- Custom Process Templates and work items. We have a project on our Team Foundation Server for Team Foundation Server customization (almost a meta project).
- Implementing some ideas from Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/). Mainly a changelog WebPart for aggregating a change history for our WorkItems, source code, portal documents, Wiki pages. This could probably be implemented as an RSS aggregator.
- One-stop dashboard in Sharepoint for a quick overview of the state of everything in our project.
- RSS feed for changes to make it easier for developers to participate in different parallel projects.
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
Wednesday 08 November, 2006 (.Net | SharePoint | TechEd 2006)
WSS3 seems like a great upgrade from version 2. The whole programming model is becoming more in line with other programming models that Microsoft have. You can create custom event handlers for WSS3 relatively easily linking directly to the SP API to create new lists or manipulate existing data, customing metadata and list behavior seems really simple too. One addition that I haven’t seen demoed but that is possible now is creating WebParts and custom features for a single site without having to deploy your assembly to the GAC.
The parts of WSS3 that I have seen so far look like they are going to make life a lot easier for anyone who wants to create non-trivial SharePoint solutions. In addition to what we can all there are a whole bunch of extra functionality already included with WSS3 like Blog and Wiki templates, which actually look like they could work. Although I think that the contrived examples that I saw Chris Bryant and Todd Bleeker demo could potentially put people off Wikis and Blogs altogether, anyone who has used these technologies in other situations will immediately see the potential in integrating this into SharePoint. Many of the customizations that I have been discussing with my colleagues for us to implement in our Team Foundation Server WSS would be a lot easier to implement with WSS3, unfortunately I have not seen an upgrade path from WSS2 to WSS3 for Team Foundation Server yet.
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
Tuesday 07 November, 2006 (.Net | Ramblings | SharePoint | TechEd 2006)
My first day at TechEd is over, it actually feels like two days now that I think about it which is kinda weird.
I managed to sneak into the Super Early Bird priority seating for the Keynote, well I really didn't do much sneaking I just walked over and sat down but still... I am always amazed by the way Microsoft tries to sell their products to developers who are already convinced that Microsoft is the way to go. There was a lot of Vista and Sharepoint 2007 in the Keynote, nothing bad in that but the way the tools were demoed is just silly.
Speaker - "Look how easy it is to create a People-Near-Me function in a Windows Presentation Foundation application!" Click, Click, typing (inserts a 200 line snippet)
Speaker - "Now I just start my application again and all the functionality is embedded in my application, all we needed to do was enable the functionality."
Of course you only have to insert and enable functionality that you have a prewritten snippet for! I'm guessing it's a completely different story if you need to write all the code from scratch... I doubt that there is a 500 line InsertCustomBusinessLogic snippet included with Sharepoint 2007 or .Net 3.
Other than that I have enjoyed my first day, I especially enjoyed the last session with Todd Bleeker on Custom Sharepoint sites and features. Although the pace he went through the material at pretty much knocked me out but thats the way it's supposed to be at TechEd. I can read sales presentations at home, while I am here I wan't to see hardcore developer action!
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
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