Joe Sango's Blog

Changing Blogs

2005-10-18T00:56:00.000+10:00

For anyone that reads my blog, I have decided to move it over to the msmvps.com site.
Please update your feed to http://msmvps.com/joesango/Rss.aspx as this will be my last post here at blogspot.

I am planning to move my VSTS content over but the bulk will stay here for archive purposes.

Thanks and see you over at my new blog.

TFS Beta 3 SDK Coming Soon

2005-10-12T22:59:00.000+10:00

For all you kids waiting to get your hands on TFS Beta 3 SDK, you have only got about 14 sleeps to go. Brian Harry puts out the word in the VSTS Forums.

Not long now.

VSTS MVP Award

2005-10-08T20:31:00.000+10:00

Today I received some great news. I found out that I have been awarded MVP for VSTS! This is a great honour for me and I want to thank the product team for my acceptance into the program.
Huge thanks to Dave Lemphers from the MS Melbourne office for my nomination and everyone else that put in a good word J.

I look forward to continue working with VSTS and extending my involvement with community in anyway I can, especially around the launch of Team Suite next month and Team Foundation Server early next quarter.

Thanks again!

VS2003 playing with TFS

2005-10-06T18:32:00.000+10:00

I have been wondering for a while how Team Foundation Server, in the future was going to play nicely with VS 2003, if at all. Eric Lee has posted some great info on this very subject. I suspect this will be an important issue for teams, especially in the initial migration phase from vs2003 to vs2005.

Beta 2 vs Beta 3

2005-10-02T02:46:00.000+10:00

So what ARE the differences between Beta 2 and Beta 3 you might have asked yourself? Well ask no more. Brian has most of the answers.

Thanks for the heads up on that one Buck.

Bring on those power tools.

VSTSUG First Session

2005-09-30T00:31:00.000+10:00

The first official (worldwide maybe?) VSTS user group has had its first session!! Thanks to all you who came to the inaugural Melbourne VSTS user group tonight. After initial introductions, the discussions we had covered off quite a few topics including general VSTS information, MSDN pricing structure with VSTS and David Lemphers, our local Microsoft evangelist, gave everyone a run through of the new Proxy Server functionality that was released in Team Foundation Server Beta 3. Dave also had some goodies to give out at the end of the night so big thanks go to you sir! All in all, a good first session.

We got some good ideas for specific content to present at our next session and I thank everyone again for their input. I will post up details on my blog and on the VSTSUG website about our next meeting for all who are interested.

Looking forward to seeing you all again and maybe some new faces at the next meeting. J

Single TFS Install Up and Running

2005-09-29T01:16:00.000+10:00

I have finally had a second or five to sit down again and get TFS running on a single virtual machine. I am glad to report that it is all up and running and with the VS2005 IDE and Team Explorer running on my laptop, it runs like a dream baby yeahhh….The only hurdles I had were the permission issues that I spoke of in my earlier post with the TFSSERVICE user and the TFSREPORTS logins. I did end up putting them into the local admin group on the virtual machine and hey presto, no more tears. Still not convinced that its good practice but at this stage, I will take this win and carry on. Future “gotta look at” I guess…..

So now I got single and duel server install covered which is great timing actually, with the Melbourne VSTS user group later today at 5.30pm. If anyone is having dramas with installation, we can go through the process and try and see if we can group diagnose common problems.

I am looking forward to catching up with everyone and talking up everything VSTS and whatever else we end up chattin’ about!

See ya there….

VSS 2 TFSSC

2005-09-27T22:43:00.000+10:00

There are a lot of dev teams currently out there (big and small) that use VSS as part of their projects. If you are in one of those teams and are interested in (eventually) moving to VS 2005 and Team System, check out these from Akash. He is the source control converters for TFS man at MS. A bunch of great posts on using the VSS converter with Beta 3.

Beta 3: A win and a loss...

2005-09-26T17:42:00.000+10:00

Finally had a chance yesterday to sit down and install TFS Beta 3 along with SQL CTP Sep and TS RC. I can definitely say there is a significant improvement to the once painful install process that the earlier CTP’s and Beta’s put us through. The documentation is very clear and easy to follow and it keeps the guess work down to an all time minimum. The new health check feature is a great addition and can potentially pick up any dependency problems before they happen.

Saying that though, my attempt at a single server TFS install was a bit of a flop. L

The main issue I was having came about after I had “successfully” installed TFS on the one virtual machine. At project creation stage, it was falling over when it was time to create the project portal. The error message was clearly stating that my login did not have appropriate access to create WSS sites and that I should be granted access from the Sharepoint Admin. My TFSSETUP user was an admin through and through so I narrowed it down to a permission issue with the TFSSERVICE account, as that is the app pool identity that WSS uses to do its thing.

David has posted a possible work around for the situation here but I am fairly sure that making the service account part of the admin group was one of the first things I tried.

These sorts of WSS security dramas haunted me with beta 2 on a single server install and it looks like they are back!! WSS not playing nicely when installed on a domain controller and such.

The “User Account Required for TFS Setup” section in the install guide mentions:
TFSSETUP - This account must be an administrator on Team Foundation Server computers.
TFSSERVICE - This account should not be an administrator on Team Foundation Server computers.
TFSREPORTS - This account should not be an administrator on Team Foundation Server computers.

The only way (so far) to get it up and running seems to be to do so. Dave is looking deeper into the whole account permission config issue and I will be joining him.

So anyway, after much hair pulling and much religious questioning, I decided to go my trusty duel server installation and it worked an absolute treat. My two virtual machines are configured the same as my Beta 2 install and it runs really well. Not a stack trace in sight. Yet…J.

Along with getting the single server experience chugging along, I’m hoping to get stuck in to Beta 3 in the next couple of nights so there should be plenty of talking points come (Shameless Plug J) Thursday, 5.30pm at the inaugural Melbourne VSTSUG session!

Also remember to check out the VSTS forums if you have any issues, questions, etc, on all things Team System. There is a bunch of stuff on TFS installation and configuration (Beta 2 and some Beta 3).

VSTSUG Numbers

2005-09-26T13:54:00.000+10:00

If anyone is interested in coming along to this Thursday's meeting and haven't already let me know, could you please tell me or register here by Tuesday 27th September so I can finalise numbers for catering.

Much appreciated.

It's here!

2005-09-24T10:00:00.000+10:00

The wait is over..........

Go and get it!!

TF Beta 3 signed and sealed!!

2005-09-22T13:48:00.000+10:00

Cool!! Team Foundation Beta 3 has officially been signed off and should appear in MSDN in a couple of days. Check out this post by Buck and this one by Jeff. Great work guys.

I was hoping to get a good chance to install and test run the RC1 and B3 before the VSTS user group next Thursday. Looks like I will…J

While I am on the topic, is there any particular part of Team System that anyone wants to see run at the user group? I wasn’t thinking to run any sort of particular demo at session one but there might be something someone wants to see now with the funky latest release coming out. Don’t be shy to let me know.

VSTS User Group Reminder

2005-09-22T11:16:00.000+10:00

Just a quick reminder for the people of Melbourne (or anyone who is floating around ;) ), that the first Team System user group meeting is next Thursday, 29^th September starting at 5.30pm. Go to our website for more details.

If you are interested in coming along and joining our community, please let me know by either registering at the website or you can send me an email directly. Quite a few people have expressed interest already and I just need a good guesstimate on numbers so I can organise eats and drinks.

Thanks everyone. Hope to see you there. J

1 week to go!

Team Foundation Source Control by Proxy

2005-09-22T01:31:00.000+10:00

I have been catching up on quite a few webcasts over the last couple of nights and just before, I was watching Rick LaPlante on one of the Channel 9 vids talking about VSTS and how his rather large team of devs were actually using the product for 9 months (at that point). I know that’s fairly common knowledge now but he was also explaining how the guys optimised the proxy communication used for the Team Foundation source control that all the geographically disbursed VSTS teams were simultaneously using, so much so, that it was outperforming SourceSafe by some huge number (400%) at certain times and given the nature of the communication.

“That’s really impressive! I wouldn’t mind hearing more about that”, I said to myself (there was nobody around at the time) and wouldn’t you know it, I see this neat little post come through from Buck Hodges that gives a bit more insight into the experience. I’m sure you didn’t intend to read my mind Buck! :P

VSTS Beta 2 Installation Redux.

2005-09-21T16:30:00.000+10:00

With TFS beta 3 a sniff away now, I thought I would give a quick recap and offer a few hints for a successful beta 2 installation procedure.
I recently deployed another fresh install of TFS beta 2, Sql Server 2005 and VS 2005 Team Suite beta 2 over a duel server config (instead of the popular single machine deployment). Some folk are still having a bit of trouble here and there with their installs and they might come across similar problems with beta 3 so what a good time to share!

First and foremost, go and grab the install guide (if you haven't already got it :P).
Walkthroughs for both single and duel machine installs are covered. It’s a good, straight forward guide so follow it close.

This is the specific config I used with relatively no headaches.

2 clean vpc’s both with Windows 2003 Server SP1 with latest security updates installed.

Data Tier

DNS (Domain Controller)
Active Directory
IIS 6
SQL Server 2005
TFS (Data Tier Only)

App Tier and Client Tier

IIS 6
WSS 2.0 SP1
TFS (App Tier Only)
Word 2003
Excel 2003
Project Pro 2003
Team Suite Beta 2

Now, as you may or may not have read around the VSTS community blogs and forums, installing the DC and Active Directory first on the Data Tier before installing IIS, will save you a great deal of certain heart ache down the track. So install the AD/DNS server role BEFORE the App server role!!
Another “gotchya” area seems to be the setup of domain user account’s required for TFS. Specifically the setup account (domain\TFSSETUP) used to install TFS. Make sure that it's part of the domain admin group in AD and the admin group locally on both tiers.
A lot of setup errors also come from SQL Reporting Services issues so be sure to check that out.
That’s the data tier.

Now, first thing you should do when you start the app/client tier is add it to the domain you created and check you have connectivity between the boxes. If you copy over VPC images to create separate machines, be wary of the fact that both machines will have the same unique ID (SID) and will not talk to each other. Further explanation and fix here and another here.

The other main thing to watch out for when installing the rest of the app tier is when WSS 2.0 is installed, you have to exclude SQL Server Reporting Services from WSS management. It mentions this in the walkthrough single server deployment but not the duel server deployment section. I initially hadn’t excluded them so consequently, I was getting errors when trying to create new team projects and accessing the reports after installation was complete. Using the STSADM.EXE tool on the app tier for exclusion rectified this.
From the install guide:
STSADM.EXE -o addpath -url http://localhost/Reports -type exclusion
STSADM.EXE -o addpath -url http://localhost/ReportServer -type exclusion

All that’s left is the client tier and following the install guide for this makes it dead easy.
Hopefully with a bit of luck, you will have VSTS running smoothly without any major dramas and you will be well on your way to collaboration! Hey, I’m an optimist! ;P

If anyone is having any other significant problems during an install, feel free to drop me a line and I will help out as much as I can. Same goes for when Beta 3 lands!

Good luck all! :)

Ready for the Ready 2005 Tour?

2005-09-19T17:21:00.000+10:00

The Ready Tour 2005 Down Under is set to kick off in a couple of months and our main MS community man has put out a call for suggestions and ideas to truly make the launch a community affair (to remember?).
Have a look at the Ready Tour 2005 blog and have your two cents. You want a karaoke themed VSTS presentation or demo? Let 'em know. How about a Biztalk Boxing Bonanza? Could happen.....

TFS Beta 3 nearly here!

2005-09-19T12:24:00.000+10:00

Heard this morning that Team Foundation Server B3 will be released at the end of the week or early next week.
TFS B3 is intended to work with VS2005 RC, which you can get from MSDN subscriptions now, and the September CTP of SQL Server 2005. I believe it should be RC come VS2005 launch (November) and go live version early next year.

Not long now.

More RAM for VPC good yes?

2005-09-07T23:42:00.000+10:00

I use VPC all the time in my dev adventures and I decided to upgrade my laptop from 1 gig to 2 gig RAM to give me a little bit more of a pleasurable experience when coding, debugging, etc.
Anyhoo, I throw the two, 1 gig chips and get my machine going again in anticipation that EVERYTHING is going to be faster. My screen even looked bigger and wider!! Weird....Before I know it, the pic of my kids is staring at me on the desktop and I'm ready to go.
I fire up VPC and slide the memory allocation up to a gig on one of my dev virtual machines and hit the away you go button and low and behold, it tells me there is not enough memory on the host to start the v machine!! What the!!! I kept dropping the mem allocation and it wasn't until 350 mb that it would start. Kinda kooky as previously when I had 1 gig of RAM, I was running it at 650 MB. So long story short (sort of), I used the msinfo32 app from the command line to see what might be chewing up my memory. From the System Summary->Software Environment->Running Tasks, check out the Min and Max Working Set coloumns (values in bytes) and if anything there seems unusually high, you just may have found your leech.
I found some process that was part of an app long gone and disused and was using a ridiculous amount of memory for its set. Once I gave it the boot, VPC saw the light and realised that I did indeed have a crap load of RAM to spread around.

FYI for any gamers, 2 gig doesn't hurt your WOW experience either! Ironforge returns....goodbye Lagforge!! Ahhhhh forget it...... :P

Back in the Groove

2005-09-07T23:13:00.000+10:00

I'm back in the swing of things now after my break on the Gold Coast with my family. First night there, had a great time catching up with the Readify guys and gals for dinner as well as some Microsofties. Good to finally put names to faces! :)
It would have been sweet to get there earlier for Tech-Ed but what can you do.

Did the whole Sea World, Movie World experience with the fam and apart from being exhausting, we actually had a great time. The only problem I had was Bruce Wayne's manor at Movie World had two bat symbols on the entrance. I tried telling Batman himself, when he made his 3.30 appearance, that surely his alter ego would not advertise the fact he was indeed the Dark Knight. All I got was a blank stare and he said "Look buddy, this isn't what I do. I play keyboards". I was going to take my gripe to the Justice League but when I saw that the Green Lantern was some skinny white guy with curly afro, I decided against it. At least the Looney Tunes gang didn't disappoint. I'm over it now. :P

Well I guess now I'm in holiday recover mode... :P

VSTSUG meeting details confirmed!

2005-08-25T23:18:00.000+10:00

Cool! The first Melbourne VSTS user group meeting will be held on Thursday 29th September 2005 at the Victoria.NET headquarters (CITC building), kicking off at 5.30pm.
Head to the Melbourne VSTSUG website for details and register yourself if you are interested in attending.

At this point I would like to re-iterate my vision for these meetings.
The VSTSUG meetings are going to be informal, relaxed sessions with a group of professionals from all walks of the industry, getting together to discuss and learn more about Team System. The level of success and productivity of these sessions is going to be based on the interaction, contribution and participation of everyone involved. I don't want these sessions consisting soley of presentation after presentation with content each meeting coming from a select few, with a bit of Q&A thrown in between. I want to hear from everyone. Lets all talk about VSTS and what it means to us. What part will it play in your or your company's future? What are you passionate about? Presentations, content, discussions, all will be driven by you.
That is how I see these sessions running.

As usual, I would love to hear any feedback from anyone out there interested in what I am rambling about ;).
Looking forward to catching up with all of you at the first meeting!

VSTSUG Website Live!

2005-08-18T01:10:00.000+10:00

The Melbourne VSTS User Group website is up and running. Thanks to Dave for helping get that setup.
I will be adding more content over the coming weeks but it will basically have information on upcoming meetings, summary of previous meetings and no doubt, other VSTS goodies and tid bits!
If you are interested in being a part of our community, head on down and register at the website or just subscribe to the news rss feed and keep up to date with the group's going-ons.

Melbourne Team System User Group

2005-08-10T00:15:00.000+10:00

I have been going through Team System functionality since last October upon initial CTP release and although lately it has'nt been my main focus, I am still very excited about the potential of the product, especially with the earmarked official release in November.
In a conversation I was having with Dave Lemphers, I proposed the idea of starting a VSTS user group in Melbourne that focuses soley on the Team System product and he is behind me all the way. Thanks Dave! :)

My idea is that the TSUG is not purely just for developers but potentially for all roles that VSTS provides functionality for e.g Project Managers, BA's, Architects, Testers etc.
Dave has held some great lunchtime sessions introducing VSTS to not only the development community, but to the "business" community that extend to all SDLC roles within a company which I think is fantastic. My vision is to extend that to form a diverse VSTS community that consists of all SDLC roles and are able to gain and share knowledge of how Team System can help them as a company colloborate more effectively on their software projects.

I would love to hear from anyone that would be interested in being a part of this.

The TSUG will be a mixture of technical material focused on the different VSTS components as well as structured business related information as in "How can we use this product/component effectively within our company?". Specific details to follow.

I am in the process of setting this up now so feel free to send me any suggestions or interests that you have.

Stay Tuned. :)

Appointment with Dr Dobbs

2005-07-07T12:06:00.000+10:00

In case any of you people out there subscribe to Dr Dobbs Journal, watch out for my VSTSEclipse article in the latest issue that is out. I had 3 copies sent to me and reading through the whole issue, it is certainly a publication that is worth getting for any software developer.

Our little project has puttered along recently but hoping to breath new life into it in the near future :P....stay tuned.

What do I do here?

2005-07-07T11:44:00.000+10:00

Wow, its been ages since I have put up a post! Let me just get the cobwebs out of here.......Ok done. Well, I have been busy busy as per usual and having a great time at my contract with Readify. It's great to be back on a .NET project I must say. Really looking forward to more .NET based work in the future, not discounting any cool J2 stuff I might happen to stumble on :).

Quick Eclipse Tip

2005-05-11T14:10:00.000+10:00

I am using the Eclipse plug-in framework to create the UI portion of our VSTSEclipse project and I found something really cool.
While you are coding in Eclipse and are adding class types in whatever you are doing, you usually have to make sure that you use the correct import statements to make use of the intellisense but a quick way to take advantage of it is to simply type the class name you are using and press ctrl-shift-o. This will automatically import the relevant package class for you!
I thought that was quite nifty for anyone who did'nt already know. :)

Flat Stick

2005-04-29T07:32:00.000+10:00

Its been a hectic few weeks and things don't look like slowing down! My current contract has me flat out along with the VSTSEclipse project, which I am trying to ramp up, plus I will be starting to contract for Readify in the next few weeks.
I am excited about working with the Readify guys and I am getting myself back into some hardcore .NET projects which I am very pleased about.
I'm trying to keep the cobwebs off my blog but damn its hard finding some time to keep this thing up to date with my musings and news that no-one probably cares about anyway! Oh well, I will keep bloggin away anyways. :P

IEEE Software Article

2005-04-29T07:18:00.000+10:00

Greg Goth, a news writer for the IEEE Computer Society magazine, is writing an article on the latest developments in Eclipse and he is including the VSTSEclipse project as part of the piece.
It sounds like it will be an interesting read. I answered a few questions he had about the project and the motivations behind it.
I believe it will be out in the July/August issue but I will post more on it when I know the exact details.

vstseclipse.org is up and running!

2005-04-27T08:50:00.000+10:00

The VSTSEclipse project website is now up and running! Thanks to Martin for organising all the details.
We will be adding and updating the content as we go so stay tuned.

VSTSEclipse on TechWeb

2005-04-20T12:13:00.000+10:00

Alexander Wolfe, an editor from TechWeb has published an article about the VSTSEclipse project! This is exciting stuff as our project gains more and more momentum.

I have also been asked by the editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal to write a few articles around the project so stay tuned.

VSTSEclipse project forges on

2005-04-15T13:56:00.000+10:00

I have recently moved the VSTS Eclipse plugin project I am part of across to SourceForge. We were on GotDotNet but at the moment, it seems a little unsteady in terms of its availability and its features comaparative to SourceForge. I have heard rumblings of an improved GotDotNet service but until such time, it looks like we are forging on.

Check it out if your interested and/or let me know if you have any questions or queries.

Team System Forums

2005-04-11T10:02:00.000+10:00

Check out this post by Rob which details the new online forums for VSTS.
Topics covered are:

General
Team Edition for software architects
Team Edition for software developers
Team Edition for software testers
Team Foundation Server
Team System Workshop
Domain-Specific Language Tools
MSF

Seems like its going to be a nice hub for VSTS info.

Now there's source all over my top...

2005-04-08T10:42:00.000+10:00

Got my hands dirty with the JBoss source code today. Not too bad, washed off ok.

I am implementing a DLQ (dead letter queue) in my JMS application and each time it tried to publish to the DLQ, I got the ol' Null Pointer message.
Well, a few kicks and screams later, I dug into the source and it turns out there is a bug in the JBoss source thats been around since the 3.2.x days and using 4.0.1, it's still there. Coincidentally, the JBoss people now say that the fix will be ported to 4.0.2! Magic.

Anyways, we recompiled and deployed ourselves with the changes and everything is hunky dory. Damn HashTables.......

We keep plug-in away.

2005-04-01T18:47:00.000+10:00

Welcome to Jon Box and Alexander West to our VSTS eclipse plugin project. I can't believe how much interest we have stirred up around the traps!
Alex Wolfe has been in contact and wants to do a story on our efforts for TechWeb. I will post some more on this as it comes to hand.

Well, I have settled in (pretty much) at my new client and I am looking to get this VSTS eclipse stuff rip roaring so I will be organising a member contact session, (possibly Skype) with some of Dave's valuable assistance. Within the next few weeks, we will have put together a plan of attack and have a clear direction in where we are headed with this project.

Plugin project update

2005-03-31T19:23:00.000+10:00

Our little VSTS plugin project for eclipse has 3 new additions. Welcome to Keith Rowe, Mitch Denny and Martin Woodward. I'm really excited to have these guys on board as they bring some great experience and knowledge.
Looking forward to getting this idea off the ground. :)

Stay tuned.

VSTS pricing and licensing

2005-03-22T18:16:00.000+11:00

Well, Rob's posted up some big news about VSTS pricing and licensing. Check it out. It's Suite! ;)

Back to the (integration) front!

2005-03-21T13:20:00.000+11:00

I have started at a new client this week that is getting me back to the integration front using webMethods. The cool thing is, along with developing the integrations, I will be working on the systems written in .NET to interface with WM as well as the Java messaging tier running on JBOSS utilising JMS! You gotta understand that this sort of work is heaven for me :P. I will be sure to post the cool and interesting stuff I come across.

Plugin to VSTS

2005-03-21T12:33:00.000+11:00

Dave Lemphers and I have started a workspace that focuses on creating a VSTS toolset for Eclipse via plugins. We have been talking about it for a while so we thought we should finally do something about it! If you have any comments, queries, suggestions or want to be involved, follow the workspace link and join up.

Process Templates

2005-03-17T18:19:00.000+11:00

Amy Hagstrom has posted some information on customising process templates for VSTS projects. Its a good brief intro into the process for anyone interested.

Application Designer Demo Part 2

2005-03-16T08:52:00.000+11:00

The link to part 2 of the App designer demo run by Robin and Liangxiao of the Whitehorse team is now available on Rob Caron's Blog.
The future for dev's is looking cool. It's all cool.

VSTS Extended

2005-03-15T20:15:00.000+11:00

I got an email from John Lawrence today regarding Team Foundation extensibility. The WIT team are releasing an article fairly soon that covers creating custom Work Item Types. Watch this space.
In the mean time, I have been looking at the extensibility kit to create custom work item types with the four command-line tools (WIT import/export) but I have not had any luck getting that working to any great degree. I was then pointed (thanks John!) to Dave McKinstry's post on the customisation process in VSTS projects and started looking at Process Template Customisation. This covers six main parts via plugins:

Classification Structure Service (Css)
Defines a team project's initial iterations, organization units, components, or feature areas.
Group Security Service (gss)
Defines a team project's initial security groups and their permissions.
Windows SharePoint Services (wss)
Defines the project portal for the team based on a SharePoint site template. Also defines template files and process guidance.
Currituck
Defines a team project's initial work item types, queries, and work item instances.
Rosetta
Defines a team project's initial reports.
Source Code Control (scc)
Defines a team project's initial source code control security permissions, and check in notes.

The documentation in the kit goes into further detail so check it out if your interested. I am still going through the MSF Agile template xml that I extracted via VS and it is giving me a good insight into key concepts and architecture of process templates in VSTS. I recommend anyone interested in VSTS customisation to have a browse of this.
That said, I can't wait for the upcoming article guys!! :)

Application Designer Demo

2005-03-15T08:46:00.000+11:00

Rob Carron has posted a link to a video of two members (Robin and Liangxiao) of the Whitehorse team demonstrating the app designer in action in a team environment (part 1). Its a good little watch to see the designer do its thing. Take a look.
I notice that they use SourceSafe as part of their SCM option not TF source control. I assume it was a choice for the sake of a smooth running demo as there is still a bit of ironing to do on the team foundation source control tool.
I have encountered a weird bug here and there when trying to add solutions to source control and had to find quick work arounds to check my solution in. Not pretty yet but looking good. BUT it is good to see SourceSafe integrating nicely in VS2005 for those smaller teams.

What's WIT TFS?

2005-03-10T09:30:00.000+11:00

I am making my way through Team Foundation Server and I must agree with Chris Menegay, Work Item Tracking (WIT) is fantastic.
Just a quick refresher. A Work Item can be and usually is, every piece of work in a project. Whether it is a bug, task, requirement, etc, doesn’t matter. Every piece can be tracked including change issues such as Who made the change?, who authorized the change? and what bug did this change fix?.

Default WI types currently available.

I used VS to add my work items and it’s a nice clean interface to use.

Information added against the work item is used to link it to other parts or artifacts of a project like tests, file attachments, builds (what build can this WI be found in?) and even other work items and changesets. The tabbed pane allows easy entry of all this info.
Tightly integrated with Team Foundation Source Control and Team Project (More detail here in John Lawrence’s posts), WIT is, in my opinion, a great feature of TFS that will be pivotal in the overall delivery of successful projects using VSTS.

I’m still playing with the VSTS extensibility kit so more on WIT extensibility in an upcoming post.

VSTS on a single VPC?

2005-03-09T11:00:00.000+11:00

I heard around the traps that there maybe a VSTS release coming that implements all three tiers onto a single VPC. How cool would that be? I believe that currently Yukon and VSTS run on differing versions of the .NET CLR hence the data tier residing on a separate machine. Whether or not it's good practice is another story but for demo's, presentations, POC's, etc, I think it would be fantastic. Plus it would be welcomed by us who are RAM challenged!

Deployment Designer

2005-03-07T13:30:00.000+11:00

I briefly mentioned the Deployment Designer in one of my earlier posts.This is a great tool for not only validating current systems against proposed solutions but also for trialling different deployment strategies.
What you are actually doing is mapping the system onto a logical datacentre, otherwise known as Binding.
As well as full validation check, the Deployment diagram will check and validate the topology, hosting relationships and the existence of valid end-points, as you drag and drop system components on the diagram.
The full validation consists of checking communication pathways between applications and the Settings and Constraints defined in the Logical DataCentre diagram created.

Its as easy as:

Right clicking on the Application Designer and selecting Define Deployment from the menu.
Choose a logical datacentre diagram to validate against.
Drag and drop your system components onto the diagram

The deployment designer initially looks identical to the logical datacentre designer but now there is a system view window that contains the created system components from the Application Designer.The settings and contraints are all viewable from the deployment designer but not actually editable. The logical datacentre diagram can be edited directly and the changes are synched with the deployment diagram.

I wanted to show a quick example of the pre-validation checking. In my LD diagram, I put a constraint on my WebSites web server in the DMZ (inbound end point) to not allow web service calls. Now in my deployment diagram, if I select my web service I created for orders, it physically will not let me place it in on the WebSites server. I put it on the App Server instead because it is defined to allow web service calls.

Once I have mapped the system onto the logical datacenter, I can now validate the deployment by right clicking on the diagram and selecting Validate Diagram. If there are no errors it will validate correctly with no errors or warnings, otherewise the errors or warnings will appear in the error list (like compile errors). Just as you would expect, double clicking on the errors takes you to the relevant settings and contraints section that needs to be addressed. Very nice.

Perfect System == Perfect Solution?

2005-03-04T15:00:00.000+11:00

I had an interesting chat with me ol' mate Dave Lemphers today, who started as Microsoft's new Dev evangelist this week (Congrat's again matey).
We were talking about the .NET development community and Java's "open source" dev community specifically hitting on developer's coding mindsets and we struck on an interesting question.
Does creating the perfect system in a coding, software design sense, always equal the perfect solution for the client?
We as developers, are always looking to cut smart and efficient code (right?), but does it come to a point where it ends up being more about the system and less about the actual solution? Sometimes.

More designers? Sounds logical.

2005-03-04T11:42:00.000+11:00

I have been using the Logical Datacentre Designer in my exploration of Team Architect and it is looking fantastic. The LD designer is used to create diagrams that represent interconnected logical servers that represent a given system. These are going to be a great source of information for developers when they need to know about the target deployment environment.

Anyway, I setup 2 zones, one DMZ and one Secure. I then added some logical servers simply by dragging and dropping them on the diagram and finally connecting them up. I have to say the ui is great to work with. It is very similar to my EAI development using WebMethods and playing with Biztalk. Personally, I love a nice, clean visual dev environment no matter what I am developing in. Stimulates my senses more……but that’s another story :)...

Using the Settings and Constraints editor, you can specify the configuration of applications that will sit on the logical servers within the datacenter. For example, ASP.NET security setting constraints for applications hosted on a web server.The level of configuration through out the server types is quite impressive.

You can then trial deploy your system against the settings and constraints that have been defined in the LD designer, to make sure that it will validate in the logical datacenter environment. I think that this particular functionality is gold from a dev point of view as the system limitations/constraints are known up front so there is little room for last minute code/config changes in rolling out systems. I will talk more on deployment in my upcoming Deployment Designer run through.

VSTS Architect Designers

2005-03-03T11:25:00.000+11:00

The Application Designer (formerly known as Application Connection Designer) is used to provide a graphical representation of applications that comprise an existing system including connections between them and services offered. Connections are made between applications via their endpoints. More here.

These applications may already exist in the system or alternatively, they may represent systems that are going to be built.

A few things to note:

When you add an ExternalDatabase object to the diagram, you don't actually configure the connection properties of the database until you create the connection between the database and a particular application.
An external web service end point CANNOT be edited due to it being an external resource.
The ASP.NETWebService object will appear in the app diagram as an ASP.NETWebApplication. Its the endpoint which distinguishes it as a web service as
opposed to web content for an actual web application.

Adding methods to the proposed web services is a breeze. In the web service details window, select the web service and click on to add the name of the method. Scroll across to the right to fill in the return type and optionally the modifier and summary.
To add parameters, expand the method to reveal and type in the desired parameter name and specify the type. You can also type in a left bracer ( after you define the method return type to automatically go into adding a parameter name. The intellisense here in the type definition is a nifty feature.

Now the cool thing is you can implement the web service you just created in the diagram by right clicking on the web service and selecting Implement Application. This will create the relevant files and skeleton code for the web service ready to be physically implemented! Great stuff. Using the Visual Web Developer Web Server, I tested my web service on the fly without having to worry about configuring and publishing to IIS.

So many questions.

2005-03-02T15:50:00.000+11:00

I just read a VSTS Architect chat transcript posted a few weeks ago. The WhiteHorse team were answering questions that the community were throwing at them and I found that it answered a few of my own that I had floating around in my brain. View the transcript here.

Great source of general info for the VSTS Architect designer suite.

Back into VSTS

2005-03-01T23:00:00.000+11:00

Ok...So last year I was sucked into the Visual Studio Team System universe and despite the painful install process I went through to get the thing running on 3 VPC's, I was really impressed. If only I had this back then......dohwell....
Anyway, I got right into Team Architect, Developer and briefly work item tracking and MSBuild. I had to drop tools for a while (since late December) due to my J2EE work load and had to be satisfied with catching up on everyone's blog to keep up with what was happening.
Well I am pretty much back now and into a fresh release of VSTS over 2 VPC's, going back through all the goodies. A few niggly things have changed and I will blog them up when I can along with any funny errors that pop up along the way, starting with Architect.
Main thing is I'm back and loving it.

Finally, on with the show.

Should we start running?

2005-02-25T15:20:00.000+11:00

I have recently implemented job sheduling inside a client's web service based J2EE app using Quartz. The client app utilises the Spring framework using Tomcat and Quartz fits in a treat. I must admit, it was'nt a trivial process getting it up and running but quite nifty once implemented.
Anyone thinking of using Quartz with Spring, definitely check out the Spring API and the Quartz tutorial.
The only thing that the doco did'nt tell me was how to kick off my scheduling job once configured. Prepare to tune out............
I used a servlet that executes on Tomcat startup that creates a reference to a SingletonBeanFactoryLocator which simply calls its only method useBeanFactory(), passing it the qualified name of the relevant bean which you setup in Spring's config files. Confused? Well there's more. Once you get a reference to the specified bean, Spring will automatically find and load all the beans you have configured including the schedule bean hence, starting the sheduler.
...............and we are back again.........

Blogs Away

2005-02-23T04:23:00.000+11:00

I thought I would start blogging my adventures in the land of .NET, J2EE and EAI development as I am in a trasitional phase of my professional life. I was thinking of focusing on one of these technologies more than the other but which one?......hmmmmm. Maybe I need a nudge.