Implementing ALM Rangers Branching by right clicking

Last week we shipped one of the ALM Rangers projects I’ve been working for the last months, and that hopefully could ease the implementation of branching in TFS for a lot of people, especially now that we implemented a Visual Studio Extension.

ALM Rangers Branch Tool Visual Studio Extension
What we now released is a tool for standardized and automated implantation of branching strategies, and we put it right there you want it, on the context menu in source control explorer. By right clicking in your source tree, you can now implement the branching strategy of your choice in an easy, standardized and automated process.  This is done by right click and select the ALM Rangers Branching Tooling menu.

The first step is to simply select your branch plan. The TFS Branch Tool present a list of available branch plans and provides a short description of them. Then you select a branch plan you get prompted for the parameters needed to implement the selected operation.

Once selected and all parameters is provided you can implement the action by clicking ok, sit back and enjoy while your branching operation is applied.

Customizable and extendable
But the best part is that you can both customize and extend the functionality. The Visual Studio extension relies on .branchplans files to define what operations to perform. The .branchplans files is xml based and can easily so you can easily edit the files to add commands or modify the branching operations.

Adding a ServicePack-Release branch plan
Creating an initial structure is a good thing, but that’s only done once. Hopefully you’re doing releases more often, and if you have a more advanced strategy for releases, it can be a lot of work to handle manually.

By creating a new branch plan for your release strategy you can use the tool to have that work automated.  The tool will automatically pick up and adopt to your new branch plan and display your customized information as well as any arguments you defined for your branch plan.

It will then execute the actions you defined in your branch plan. 

And provide you with the desired result in source control.

Minor updates to TFS Administrators Toolkit

Ive just uploaded an update to the TFS Administrators Toolkit fixing the following UI glitches:

• Unified the UI in the same style
• Update Reports now works with resizing windows
• Update Work Item Types now works with resizing windows
• Source Control Folder Size now shows sizes in a own column
• Search Large files better formating of Size column

Many thanks to Gabian for pointing those issues out to me.

TFS 2010 Team Alert Subscription Tool Beta

This is now released as a free VS2010 Add-In, Please refer to Visual Studio Gallery
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/418522f7-6a2a-439f-a874-5e8190bbdbc8

This actually started as a tool/hack I started to upgrade to include in the TFS Administrators Toolkit, but after some thoughts I decided that it’s probably a good idea to release it as a separate Visual Studio extension on the Visual Studio Gallery.

Team Alerts in TFS 2010
TFS 2010 has an alert system and tools to make users subscribe to alerts quite easy. What TFS 2010 doesn’t support is to setup Team Alerts (This feature is added in the public TFS 11 Beta). Although it is possible to setup Alerts for other users, TFS 2010 doesn’t offer an easy tool for this.  So if you want to setup your project or team with a nice set of alerts, you would run into trouble, as there hasn’t been an easy way to accomplish that on TFS 2010.

Team Alert Subscriptions Tool
The Team Alert Subscriptions Tool will help you to setup and apply Team Alerts for different groups in your team project. It will do this by creating Alert templates for groups, and automate creation individual alerts for each user in the targeted group.

Intended feature set
The main features will be:
•    A UI for creating Team Alerts by converting “ordinary” Alerts
•    Subscribe and Unsubscribe functions to create and remove individual subscriptions
•    Update All Team Alerts Subscriptions
To automatically apply Team Alerts then you add or remove users is possible bur would require a server part constantly connected and listening for security changes, such as a new user added to a team project group.  This will not be included in the VS add in, but might be released as a separate download or extension.

Current state
I have done most of the UI and I’m currently testing it. This is the current screenshot:

As before I’m looking for volunteers to test and contribute to the development of the Team Alerts Subscription Tools.

TFS Administrators Toolkit

Over time I’ve written a couple of tools to ease the headaches that sometimes comes from running a couple of TFS servers. Most of them I just hacked together to get a working state, command line tool. Once the problem was solved I simply backed up the source, and went on with the next problem. This has not been a good approach for long run reuse and efficiency.

Collected and published as a Visual Studio add-in
This time then I needed some of the tools, I decided to put a little more effort into it and try to collect the different tool in a collection, build some basic UI and publish them as a Visual Studio Add-In. I will try to pick and hopefully convert the tools and add them to the toolkit as I find the needs for them.

First of: Update Reports and Work Item types for a team project collection
I actually started already, by converting two tools used to do batch updates of already created team projects. It can be quite a work to update a number of team projects with new features developed such as reports or Work Item Types customizations. With the TFS Administrators toolkit you can simply do it with a couple of clicks, and sit down and enjoy while the tools updates the selected team projects for you.
You will find the TFS Administrators Toolkit Visual Studio Add-in on Visual Studio Gallery http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/11f5e313-ced1-4713-9794-d7300c7d12e0

Iteration Manager feature complete, Public beta available

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a new Visual Studio Add-In I’ve started to work on. Thegood news is that the add-in is now feature complete, at least for the intended feature set for the first release. So far it’s undergone a limited amount of testing by a handful brave persons.

Public beta available
I’m making the plugin publicly available for anyone who wants to test it and provide feedback. If you want to test it, you can simply download it form this link https://skydrive.live.com/#cid=5D46CAE8C0008CF0&id=5D46CAE8C0008CF0!1027. Once downloaded simply open it and it will install itself inside visual studio 2010.


Current feature set
Once installed, the Iteration Manager add-in adds a new menu item to the Team Project menu in team explorer. From there you can access the Iteration Manager for the selected team project and select the operation you want to use.
Iteration manager feature set
Under the Iteration Manager menu you will find this menu to access the different operations Iteration Manager can assist you with.




New Iteration
The new iteration operations assist you in creating iterations. It can assist you with the following:
• Create the Iteration Node
• Create a Sprint work item and set iteration and dates.
• Create a new Iteration query folder, by copying a template query folder, and edit all queries to select your new iteration.

The different options will be dependent on your process template and your configurations.

Change current iteration
The Change Current Iteration operations assist you in changing the current iteration in your team project by editing and changing the iteration filter for all queries in your Current sprint folder.

Configure Iteration Manager
The Configure Iteration Manager options is a place there you hopefully don’t need to go to change anything if your running any of the common process templates. If you made customizations to your team project, or have any other needs, you can configure the different actions the iteration manager performs in the other operations.