Automatically Resolving Secondary Assembly References With MSBuild and TFS Build

There is a known issue/feature with MSBuild which also affects TFS build, since it uses MSBuild to compile, where secondary assembly references are not identified and added to csc and vbc tasks. The exact details are explained here, on MSDN and Stackoverflow with various workarounds and on Microsoft Connect. Visual Studio handles the issues automatically by referencing any secondary references that are required, so you don’t see the problem in Visual Studio but may get compile […] Read more »

Missing code churn in TFS Build reports

Cranes In The Sky.

Over the last few months I have seen that some of the automated builds that we have setup aren’t producing code churn data in reports. The issue hasn’t been a high priority and I have searched online to try and find a quick fix but couldn’t find anything that related to our issues… No errors were being reported and when I actually looked into the Team Foundation Server warehouse database tables the BuildChangesetSK table didn’t […] Read more »

Reflections on three days at Tech Ed

This is my third day at Tech Ed 2008 in Barcelona, the breadth of the technologies and languages that we as .Net developers now need to at least understand and preferably master to some degree is enormous. I believe that developers will need to specialize more explicitly on certain technology areas to remain productive in the future. It has been impossible to master all of Microsoft’s products for many years now but up until a […] Read more »

Add intellisense for any file extension in Visual Studio 2005 or 2008

I have been messing about with some template experiments in dasBlog using Notepad++ and Visual Studio 2008. That is changing the site layout by editing homeTemplate.blogtemplate, dayTemplate.blogtemplate and itemTemplate.blogtemplate for a dasBlog Theme. These files are basically html files with dasBlog specific macros for inserting the blog functionality. Notepad++ First off I love Notepad++ as a replacement for Notepad.  I have had a hard time doing more complex things in Notepad++ due to my addiction to […] Read more »

Duplicate User Accounts in Active Directory

We have just had a major Active Directory issue that has affected the Team Foundation Server instance that all the developers at the client that I am working at use. The problem occured when some users where erased in the Active Directory and were subsequently recreated with the same user names. These new user accounts cannot access the Team Foundation Server. A large part of the problem was solved by just removing users from TFS […] Read more »

Moving workitems between TFS servers

{filelink=2} I have tried different methods to move work items from one Team Foundation Server to another. The easiest method is doing it with Excel, but the problem is that I also want to keep all the work item history which Excel cannot do. I found that the Revision property of each work item contains an array of complete copies of the work item as it appears at each revision. So iterating over each revision […] Read more »

Where to store documents in TFS

I have had several discussions with people I work with about where to put your documents when using Team Foundation Server. Obviously there are several places to put documentation depending on what sort of document it is. There are at least three places that make sense to me: In the SharePoint Portal In the Version Control repository As attachments on Work Items Each of these places has their advantages and disadvantages. I have found two […] Read more »

Team Build does not work when connecting from a workgroup to a domain

I have been attempting to run a Team Foundation build server on a separate machine outside our domain. Install and connectivity between the servers was no problem but once we got the build configuration up and tried to perform a build from Team Explorer we got an error: TF42056: The build service could not connect to the Team Foundation Server: TF30063: You are not authorized to access https://myserver. I tried all our standard solutions: Set […] Read more »

Migrating Team Projects between Team Foundation Servers

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 […] Read more »

TeamPlain and how I would like it to integrate with Team Foundation Server

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 […] Read more »