Sparkling- Leo's Blog

Test Plan Administration

2010-11-21T12:56:29Z

The following protocol is to be followed when defining a Test Plan in order to avoid the deletion

There is no way to manage the delete permissions separated from the edit and creation, but there is a work around related to the iteration/Area of the test plan

Step 1- Create a separated area for suggested Test Plans, in this area the plan is inactive (as is not approved yet) and can be created by each one of QA team.

The un-active state avoid the deletion of the Test Plan

In this area QA members only can work and the plan is related to the area only.

Step 2- Move the Test Plan to state active under Approved area

Once the Test Is created the QA manager will approve and move to active and to the approved area

In this area the QA members are unable to delete the Test Plan

Pre-requisites:

Define the areas, associate the permissions

Let's do it:

From VS2010, under Team>>Settings>>Areas…

In Areas Dialog define the Areas ( And/ Or you can choose the Iteration)

Define for the QA Team, the proposed and approved security issues

Step 1-

Create a new plan (as QA member)

Create a Test Plan (Area will be default, so you need to be able to add to Area)

When you try to changed to approved and save it...

You get the appropriated message

Then the team leader moved it to approved. When the QA member try to delete we see is unable to do it

Limitations:

This is a workaround and not the expected behaviour

תגים של Technorati:‏ Team System,Test Plans

, but it works, if the area issue is not enough you can play with the iteration issue, the state (inactive) is not strong enough and a Test Plan can be deleted even in this state

SfTS v2 to v3 Migration tool? Better now than never…

2010-09-15T12:10:53Z

EMC Consulting Announce Plans to Produce SfTS v2 to v3 Migration tool.

EMC has today announced the intention to produce a Work Item Migration tool for users of SfTS v2 who wish to migrate to a new SfTS v3 project.

Design and development work on this are due to start mid September and a preliminary first draft solution is expected late October 2010.

Limitations:

The intention behind this solution is to migrate work item history only. Migration of: Source Control, change history, external attachments, build definitions, etc will not be included in this solution.

Beta Testers and Early Access:

Beta testers are welcome and will receive early access to builds in return for feedback. Please email ScrumforTeamSystem@emc.com stating that you would like to take part in migration tool beta testing and we will contact you with further details.

Going from scrum v2 to Microsoft scrum 1.0 (part III)

2010-09-06T14:48:42Z

In the previous we saw the different steps to go from v2 to MS Scrum templates.

Now I will touch in each of the steps, but skipping the first one

2- Tools for Migration, the unique TFS Integration platform.

The tool covers in details any of the strategies to follow, I suspect that this is material is difficult to follow when you want to go forward quickly, so I provide one of the ways, not necessarily the most systematic or recommended, if you have the time probably the best way should be, do it aside and then if all is good do it again for real. But as I don't have the time for testing I will do the process in a single shot.

The Risk: Not much, if fail define the real as demo and start again. The produced workitems can be destroyed (not friendly interface but possible) and the sourcecontrol too.

And as I said before: No risk, no chance.

First step: You will need to change your project, I know this is a lack in the continuity of the project but look at this a necessarily change, even if you could you will prefer to leave the current project unchanged for sure.

Install the TFS integration platform (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server Integration Tools)

Start to read the documentation in Getting Started

(Required time: from 0 to Days)

3- The New MS Scrum template. And how to install

After Installing you expect the template to be there when you create a project, but for that you will need an extra step.

Open VS2010 or team explorer shell and from menu open the Process Template Explorer

The following dialog will be open…

Probable you will have the v2 here as result of the upgrade (You have the template as part of the Upgrade even that you didn't and can't install it because of the v2 limitations with TFS 2010)

To add the MS Scrum select Upload and select the template folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0\Process Template)

After that go through the wizard to create a project, in template step you will have the new one

Project creation takes time… (some minutes)

Then you will have your project based MS scrum.

This is your target project! You will transfer the workitems and/or sourcecontrol and/or changesets to it

The migration process takes time, you have done the easy step.

The longest journey starts with a single step…

(Required time: 10 minutes)

Going from scrum v2 to Microsoft scrum 1.0 (part II)

2010-09-06T11:36:49Z

What you will need:

1- A guide to move to TFS 2010, out of scope, links and hints will be provided.

This one is very extensive, obviously depend on your TFS architecture (Single, double or multiple server)

But in some words the upgrade should take your old TFS 2008 to the New TFS 2010, including all the projects.

For this you will need to install the TFS 2010 in a new environment (recommended virtual) and backup and restore most of the databases.

The procedure includes also the sharepoint (or wss) content.

The TFS guide included in the TFS 2010 installation is the best guide to use, but is not so friendly and is in help (chm) format not showing a process clearly, the benefits are covering and up-to-date information.

After the upgrade that takes at least some hours you will have a TFS that reflects all the work in TFS 2010, but you will find issues with the v2, I found for example that the documentation is probably there but not accessible, that is the folder looks empty; the web site is not accessible at all and the reports are there but doesn't work.

The worst is there is no solution for this through Conchango/EMC way or other tricky way (?)

The solutions here include pragmatic resolution using tools, by yourself.

2- Tools for Migration, the unique TFS Integration platform.

3- The New MS Scrum template. And how to install

4- Matching settings between (XML) between v2 and the new workitems.

5- Some extra adaptations of your customized workitems. To be explained in details in next part

6- Time. I can help you with this ;o)

To be continued…

Going from scrum v2 to Microsoft scrum 1.0

2010-09-06T11:06:38Z

1- Introduction

Problem: If you are moving from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 and your project is based on Conchango Scum Template v2 probably you will find the following problem:

v2 is not compatible with TFS 2010 AKA: The model is changed

v3 and v2 are not compatibles AKA: When one company buy another (EMC>>Conchango) nobody takes responsability

There is not a migration policy to move from one to the other AKA: You are on your own

Solution: No risk, no chance

In one hand you don't want to waste the chance to move forward fo TFS 2010.
On the other hand you want to continue your development with the workitems and sourcecode and history without influence in your daily work.

So how to solve this paradox? (well a paradox don't have a solution, but this is life)

EMC is the owner of that scrum template but in some years who knows? And how do you know what will happen with the next version of TFS in a couple of years? A new break?

I think the natural move is from scum v2 to v3, but if you are not and enterprise organization or for clear reasons you want to use the new MS Scrum Template based on Agile this guidance is for you.

(See next parts, to be continued…)

test

2010-08-08T11:23:35Z

Team Explorer versions for TFS 2010

2010-04-25T11:56:19Z

Technorati Tags: TFS2010,TECH

Download the following packets:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 (Installer)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d

Required by a user of VS2008, requirements VS2008SP1

Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 (Installer)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689&displaylang=en

Required by a user of VS2005, requirements VS2005SP1

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 (AKA Teamprise)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=af1f5168-c0f7-47c6-be7a-2a83a6c02e57

Required by a user of Eclipse

Upgrade TFS 2010 Beta 2 to RTM

2010-04-25T11:38:02Z

Server Side

1- Take a snapshot of the current TFS Server

2- Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 (Shield) and all the references to any pre-release product

I also remover the Power and the SideKicks Tools, the Shell edition, etc.

3- Delete the folders related to old installed version

4- Start the re-installation of the TFS RTM, the same options installed in the previous version

5- Select the Upgrade Option

If you follow the link no patches are required

Technorati Tags: TECH,TFS2010

I know this screen show the optimal situation, If something goes wrong they will not help.

Re-Install the new versions of Power Tools and SideKicks

IPhone next generation...

2010-04-12T07:56:00Z

So they said that Microsoft represent the monopole? So what about Apple trying to avoid others to create applications for IPhone. A petty and a precedent for all the people that believe that security is closeness Read: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/04/11/has-steve-jobs-gone-mad/

Developer Academy IV Lights and Shadows

2010-03-23T09:58:12Z

Shadows:

1- In the site of the Dev Academy the presentations are different (the link is miss) and poor (2, 3 slides instead of the full presentation)

2- Look Brad Adams Blog:

“…the food fantastic.”

“It was in a beautiful part of Tel Aviv.”

Far away from that in my humble opinion

3- Some presentations, specially the first one on Azurre, was just talking.

Without technical aspects, etc, so I have no problem with marketing when you want to push a technology, that is also great in my opinion

When the CTO of MS Israel makes marketing I feel disappointed, or as someone said:

There is no second chance for first impression

4- Some topics that are really interesting and HOT were at the same time, in the other hand other that are far away from that were available like they were very important

5- Not seats when wanting to eat, I ate in the grass, but is OK.

6- Too much Twitter

7- Toilets, full, and dirty

Lights:

1- Well Organized

2- In time

3- Some presentations were really interesting (WCF + WF, Coded UI, Team System), good ideas (Labs and Experts)

4- A lot of nice people to meet

5- Great Show

A 7+ in my scale

Performance metrics

2010-02-04T04:29:00Z

The common counters, in next session the WEB and ASP.NET counters and Database counters too.

In WEB applications is the W3WP and in desktop the application or service

Category	Counter	Description	Recommendations
Processor	% Processor Time	Total percentage of processor utilization across all processes	General indication of system utilization
Process	% Processor Time	Like before but specific to a single process.	Isolate the problems of the System from the others like Data, etc
Process	Working Set	The amount of memory pages in use by all threads within the process, is listed in bytes.	Memory usage of a specific process.
Memory	Available Mbytes	The amount of available physical memory in the system.	Can show if an application has a memory leak
Memory	Pages/Sec	The number of hard faults per second. A hard fault is when pages of memory are read from, or written to, disk.	Since disk operations are relatively slow compared to memory operations, hard faults are quite expensive in terms of system performance. The larger this counter, the worse the overall system performance will be. This counter should ideally be zero or at least very low.
Memory	Page Faults/Sec	Very related to the previous. Represents the number of hard and soft faults per second when soft fault is where a page of memory was elsewhere in physical memory, and needed to be swapped into the process address space.	Since memory operations are very fast, having a high number of soft faults is generally OK, as most systems can cope with this. Monitoring this counter can help provide the tipping point where hard faults begin to occur and where soft faults become excessive.
.NET CLR Memory	Gen 0 heap size, Gen 1 heap size, Gen 2 heap size	Part of the .NET CLR garbage collector mechanism collection. The Gen 0 heap size, Gen 1 heap size, and Gen 2 heap size represent the memory heap size of each respective generation.	Heap size counters should show approximately a 1:10:100 pattern
.NET CLR Memory	#Gen 0 Collections, #Gen 1 Collections, #Gen 2 Collections	Part of the .NET CLR garbage collector mechanism collection. Generation 0 (Gen0): The shortest lived, most often collected and least expensive to collect. Generation 2: Contains the longest-living objects, is collected the least often, and is the most expensive in terms of performance to collect. The #Gen 0, #Gen 1, and #Gen 2 collection counters represent the number of times each generation had a garbage collection performed.	#Gen 0, #Gen 1, and #Gen 2 collections should follow a 100:10:1 pattern
.NET CLR Exceptions	# of Excepts Thrown / sec	The number of exceptions being thrown per second by the application, and should be very low.	If a web application utilizes a lot of Response.Redirect calls then will generate a thread aborted exception. If this counter is high and there are a lot of Response.Redirect calls in the web application, then the counter may be representative of this, and it may be worthwhile trying to replace the calls with ones to the overload of Response.Redirect, which also takes a bool as the second parameter, and set that bool to false. This causes the request to not immediately terminate processing of the current page, (which is what causes the thread aborted exception
.NET CLR JIT	% Time in JIT	Shows the percentage of elapsed time the CLR spent in a Just in Time compilation phase. Should be relatively low, ideally below 20%.	Above this level can indicate that perhaps some code is being emitted and dynamically compiled by the application. Using the NGEN command-line tool against your application assemblies to create a native, pre-JIT compiled image for the target platform can reduce this.
.NET CLR Security	% Time in RT Checks	Represents the percentage of time spent performing Code Access Security (CAS) checks, should be very low, preferably zero	Exceeding 20%, can hamper system performance and cause excessive CPU utilization. This can often be caused by accessing resources across a network share or Storage Area Network where network credentials and security contexts need to be evaluated to gain access to the resource.
.NET CLR Locks and Threads	Total # of Contentions	Represent the number of unsuccessful managed-lock acquisitions. Total amount of unsuccessful lock acquisition attempts by threads managed by the CLR	When using the lock statement, System.Monitor.Enter statement, and the MethodImplOptions.Synchronized attribute.
.NET CLR Locks and Threads	Contention Rate / Sec	Represent the number of unsuccessful managed-lock acquisitions. Amount/sec of unsuccessful lock acquisition attempts by threads managed by the CLR	Unsuccessful locks can cause serious performance issues when the rate is high, as the threads are not only synchronized but ultimately unsuccessful, potentially throwing exceptions and waiting excessively. This rate should be very low, ideally zero.

Converting VSS to TFS 2010

2010-02-02T11:37:00Z

Technorati Tags: TECH,TFS2010

Converting VSS to TFS 2010 Beta 2 has some differences with the parallel process between VSS and TFS2005/8

You will need an updated version of the VSSConverter

There is a small problem here, you will prefer the process to run at the Server to avoid communications overhead, in the other hand you want to install at TFS server the minimal set, that is the Team Explorer, but not the complete Visual Studio.

The VSS converter is not there under the installation path.

What I did was just take the required DLL’s (let say all of the vss* in that folder) were copied from my client to the relevant folder in TFS server.

The HotFix for Visual Sourcesafe KB 950185, that can be downloaded from:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=KB950185&DownloadId=2204

The connection to TFS

The new Default Collection and TFS name produce an error after mapping, in 2010 you need the collection just there

The TFS target Project

There is a problem related to the target TFS project, you expect the VSSConverter to do the job but in fact you receive two possible errors, if you don’t create you got one, if you create you get other. The workaround is to create the project and inside the project create a folder (I did that under Work Item Template) and then add it to the mapping.

Connect Team Explorer 2008 to TFS 2010 Beta 2

2010-01-24T16:13:47Z

A simple trick…

From Team Explorer 2010 just copy the link of the Default Collection

Then Paste in Team Explorer 2008

That’s it!

Another SNMP open source, looks very nice

2009-12-30T20:55:16Z

http://sharpsnmplib.codeplex.com/

Including tests and even a Browser

Recommended

Memory leaks, the free way

2009-12-30T20:42:12Z

In case you want to check the Memory leaks of your applications I recommend the following strategies:

1- Define a single scenario, AKA that is repeatable and does not depends on others or influence on them

2- Isolate the scenario if possible from application reactions, for example if the scenario calls other components

3- Check it with Task Manager following the interesting counters, like Virtual Memory, Allocated Memory, etc

4- If you find leaks, try use the CLRProfiler, for the moment use the Framework 2.0

It’s free, the interface is +/-, the operability is –, and the results once you understand the GC and the Heap are stunning

You can use PerfMon to follow repeatable scenarios in the background (Run it from CLI)

If you have money the best Memory profiler is called…Memory Profiler, is much clear and friendly and sharp, they have a shareware version

Inside VS there are other tools under Analyse Menu toolbar, they are more related to CPU, and can be also operable from CLI