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.

TFS Administrators Toolkit now on CodePlex

The last weekend I finally got around to publish the TFS Administrators toolkit on CodePlex. The new home for the source and backlog is now tfsadmintoolkit.codeplex.com. 

Cleanup and improved features in progress Since last release I’ve been giving the source a much needed StyleCop run through. I’ve also done some refactoring mainly of the UI for progress indication.
In terms of new or improved features I’m currently improving the Find in files feature, making it accessible directly from Source Control Explorer using a context menu, added capability to search any set of folders, and not limiting it to one Team project as of today.
I’m also in progress of improving the UI for Test Attachment Sizes, and adding the capability to break down test attachment sizes over time.

Future plans My current plan is to use the CodePlex site as home of the source and backlog, and even make beta or experimental releases on the CodePlex site. I will still continue to push more stable releases of primarily the Vs2012 VS Extension on VisualStudioGallery.

TFS Administrators Toolkit 1.1 for VS 2012

It’s been a while since the last update, but yesterday I released an update of the TFS Administrators Toolkit. Most of the new features was implemented months ago, and the source has been available in the CodePlex project, http://TfsAdminToolkit.codeplex.com.  Before I published a new release of the tool on the VS Gallery, I wanted to fix some bugs and try to address some of the feedback I got.

Find In Files integrated in source control explorer
One of the improvements I’ve made is to integrate the Find In Files feature into Source Control Explorer by adding a context menu. Now you can right click on any folder and Select Find In Files to do a recursive search in that folder. I’ve also, hopefully, fixed some bugs reported.

Improvements for Test Attachments Sizes
I made some UI improvements, like encapsulating the display of Total test attachments sizes in an expandable section. I’ve also added support for the 2012 version of TestAttachmentCleaner, as well as some other minor improvements.

Update Reports and Portals
The Update Reports features has been updated and is now called Update Reports and Portals. In the new implantation you can now select if you want to either update reports, portals or both for existing team projects. I also improved the logging features by parsing the log file for pushing new reports or portals and offers a way to easy open the logfiles.

Updates to TFS Administrators Toolkit for VS2010

A couple of days ago, I released an update for the TFS Administrators Toolkit for vs2010, it contains the following features and updates.

Subscriptions
You can now easily view your event subscriptions, server wide, by using the new Subscriptions window. The window offers a set of filters (EventType, DeleveryType, Address, Filter (Condition) ) for you to find individual subscriptions, and even a way to remove subscriptions by unsubscribing to them.

Updates to test attachment sizesUpon request I updated the Test attachment sizes feature so you now can select what project to process, instead of having to analyze all projects in the solution.

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

Find in Files : New feature of TFS Administrators Toolkit

The other day I was asked if it was possible to find out if a specific string ever had occurred in the source files of a specific project. As this is not possible in TFS out of the box today I said that it could probably be done in a couple of hours if needed.

Creating a search function    
Quite soon I was asked to put my money where my mouth was:) So I developed an Visual Studio Extension that, using the tfs api, would loop through each file and each file revision. As this would be a quite intense operation I placed it as a new feature in the TFS administrators Toolkit. I have some ideas to make it available as a standalone VS extension, extending source control explorer with a Find in File context menu, but at the moment it’s a TFS Administrators toolkit feature only.

Find in Files window
The result of my effort is the new Find in Files window in TFS Administrators Toolkit.  It enables you to search for text in the content of source controlled files.  Amongst its features is
•    Search files in source control matching selected wildcards
•    Option to search in History, searching through each file revision.
•    Option to search case sensitive or not
•    Option to search using Regular Expressions


Update!!! The Find in Files feature is availble in both VS 2010 and 2012. The 2012 version is updated with more features, as Search result prview, Source Control Explorer integration and more...

You can download the TFS Adminsitrators Toolkit from Visual Studio Gallery at

VS 2012 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/96a425aa-9ef0-4a92-b874-217d544a74bf
VS 2010 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/11f5e313-ced1-4713-9794-d7300c7d12e0