Minor updates to TFS 2012 Community Team Tools

Two weeks ago I got great feedback in the form of an email with a screencast from a user having a hard time to get the TFS 2012 Community Team Tools to work.  Not only was we able to figure out a solution to the original problem, he also managed to help me make the Community Team Tools better, and not only the Team Tools, the improvements and fixes was quickly incorporated into other projects I’m currently working on.

A new release
The result is the release 1.0.1 of TFS 2012 Community Team Tools. It contains minor bug fixes and improvements, such as:
•    Added a /? Option
•    Added warning message if a non-recognized command was passed.
•    Help text didn’t match parameters name.
The new release can be found at http://tfsteamtools.codeplex.com and http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/36986691-931d-4e2e-bbc2-1b2f03a4eff5

Sogeti Sweden Visual Studio 2012 Roadshow

During August and September my life has been somewhat hectic with a lot of WORK to be done. Except for the ramp up of client upgrades, I’ve also been planning and putting together a VS2012 Roadshow targeting 11 cities across Sweden together with my colleagues at Sogeti.

The rest of this post is information in Swedish about the Roadshow:
Tillsammans med Microsoft genomför Sogeti en nationell roadshow. På elva orter kommer vi att visa upp nyheterna i Visual Studio 2012 och Team Foundation Server 2012 med fokus på agilt arbetssätt, utvecklareffektivitet och kvalitet. Den nya Visual Studio-versionen ger stöd genom hela livscykeln, från kommunikation med beställare, till daglig drift av det färdiga systemet.

Inplanerade orter och datum

Karlstad 10/10
Borlänge 18/10
Västerås 30/10
Örebro 31/10
Jönköping 1/11
Sandviken 7/11
Umeå 8/11
Sundsvall 9/11
Linköping 15/11Stockholm 23/11
Malmö 29/11


Målgrupp  
Seminariet riktar sig till alla som är involverade i utvecklingsprojekt: kravställare, utvecklare, testare, arkitekter, scrum masters, projektledare och chefer.


Agenda
För att synliggöra nyheterna så konkret som möjligt följer vi ett agilt projekt från krav till drift. Detta så att du får en inblick i kommande möjligheter och utmaningar för dig. Kom och inspireras av hur nya Visual Studio kan hjälpa dig att hantera ditt projekt.

• Agil kravhantering
• Stöd för Agila team (Scrum & Kanban)
• Prototyping i PowerPoint
• Nyheter för utvecklare (kodgranskning, enhetstester, m.m.)
• Exploratory Testing för kvalitetssäkring
• Feedback från beställare
• Samarbete utveckling/drift i produktion

Anmälan
http://www.sogeti.se/vs2012

Proof of Concept for a UI for Deep Copy test suites

Microsoft introduced a new feature in Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) 2012 – Deep Copy of test suites. Unfortunately it’s not accessible through the MTM user interface, instead it’s only available through a command line utility. It’s not the best of user experiences..

The new Deep Copy feature
There is a Copy Test Suite feature in MTM 2010 , but it only copies a test suite so the new test suite links to the same test cases. The new Deep Copy feature in MTM 2012 copy test suites also, but it also creates copies of every test case and re-link all links in the suite. This is a great feature if you need to preserve the state of your test cases or create a baseline.

Deep copy exposed through the TFS API
Luckily the TFS API exposes methods for the new deep copy feature. The API version is, as well as the command line implementation, asynchronous. Using the API to do a deep copy is quite simple if you have the Id’s for everything. It’s actually more work building an user Interface to present a test plan and making it possible to view and select the test suites in the test plan.

An embryo for future tooling
Building the UI for the Deep Copy PoC got me thinking. There is a lot of manual work involved then building a new test plan then moving from one sprint to another, or then moving to a new release. Building the UI for the Deep Copy PoC soon got me thinking about adding other features to improve the experience of building a Test Plan.

The source
This PoC is build against the Release Candidate of VS and TFS. As usually I’ve zipped and uploaded the PoC source to my sky drive. You will find it here: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=5D46CAE8C0008CF0&id=5D46CAE8C0008CF0%211862

Community TFS Team Tools released at CodePlex

I’ve  just pushed the button and released the Community TFS Team Tools Codeplex project, and the binaries is now packaged and downloadable from Visual Studio Gallery as Community Tfs Team Command line utility. All in effort to make the tools and source code easily available.

Links and locations
You will find the Community Tfs Team Tools codeplex project at http://tfsteamTools.codeplex.com and the latest stable binaries at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/36986691-931d-4e2e-bbc2-1b2f03a4eff5

Based on the ALM Rangers Quick Response Code sample
The Community TFS Team Tools project is based on the ALM Rangers Quick Response Code Sample, and extended with more features. If you want to know more about the ALM Rangers or the Quick Response Sample that started it all, please read the following posts 
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2012/06/22/introducing-the-visual-studio-alm-rangers.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/06/11/quick-response-sample-command-line-utility-to-manage-team-foundation-server-teams-and-users.aspx

Future plans
Jason Stangroome did a PowerShell Quick Response sample based on the rangers Quick Response Sample ;) ,  you can find it at https://github.com/codeassassin/PsTfsTeams. This got me thinking about exposing the commands as PowerShell Commandlets, preferable without duplicating the code. So if I find a way, or hopefully get pointed at it,  it might be the next feature.

TfsTeam command line utility

Last week I did a quick job to unblock a rangers project and create a command line tool for managing team and team members.  Although the tool released quickly unblocked the rangers project, the feature set was far from complete, so why leave it half done?

Short recap
In the beginning of June my fellow rangers discovered a missing feature, there was no tooling to enable automation of managing the new features of teams and team members in TFS 2012 RC. A day later we had a working solution with the basic feature set (List teams, create team, add user to team) that after reviews got published as a code sample. For those more interested you can read more about it the following posts http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2012/06/13/highlighting-the-decline-of-alm-rangers-cadence.aspx  and  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/06/11/quick-response-sample-command-line-utility-to-manage-team-foundation-server-teams-and-users.aspx

Completing the feature set
After a short brainstorming exercise I came up with the following basic features ListTeams, GetDefaultTeam, SetDefaultTeam, CreateTeam, DeleteTeam,RenameTeam, ListTeamMembers, addUser, RemoveUser as a suitable feature set for a first release. As I got most things setup and figured out already it didn’t take long to implement the complete feature set.

The resulting exe and source code can now be downloaded from my skydrive until I can get an official place to put it to.

 

Next step
The next step is most likely to release it on codeplex and Visual Studio Gallery as a community tool. And then start building a backlog, witch at the moment contains a couple of minor fixes and perhaps looking to add PowerShell Commandlets to it.