Roy Rosenberg

Update Work Item Check-in policy for TFS 2010

RoyRose — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:35:00 GMT

Because of the high demand of the source code of the Update Work Item Check-in policy I posted here, here is the code of the custom check in policy you all wanted.

I made some adjustments and improvement:

Setting Window

The check-in policy can be customized without the need to recompile. From Team Project Setting àSource Control, go to check in policies, choose the Capito CheckIn Policies WITHours Editor and click edit button.

The settings window lets you choose the end-date, reaming work and completed work fields to update while checking in, in case you use different fields than the built-in ones.

Also, you can decide if the developer must update the completed work field while checkin in

Deployment

You have install folder with the latest assemblies.

To manually deploy them, just choose you OS folder (XP or 7) and click the batch file that copies the DLL and registers it in the registry.

Have fun!

Note: not yet tested on TFS 2012. feel free to let me know what you think..

Download

Missing TFSJobAgent Service in OS Service list

RoyRose — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:18:00 GMT

This case should not happen to you unless the TFS machine is crashed just after the TFS installation.

In my case, I installed clean TFS and upgrade from TFS 2008 to 2010 without any problems. Just after the upgrade the IT guy decided to remove a disk storage that caused the OS to crash.

We tried to restart the server without any luck. And then, the IT guy chose "restore to last good configuration" option when the OS loaded. The TFS went back and everything worked fine so I could not realized that the "Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent" service was not listed on the OS services.

After 1 week we started to notice that the TFS did not work as we used to…

· Iterations and Areas – administrators can add new Iteration\Area values but team members could not see those values inside the iteration\area fields inside work item forms.

· Reporting services stop refreshing – even though it seemed to be in progress inside the TFS Admin console

· Alert stopped working also. Usually the TFS notifies in the event viewer that something is wrong with the notification but I found no relevant information there.

So, what is going on here???

TFSJobAgent service is gone! Vanished! The TFS continued to work (almost) I mean the source control\work items\build\documents were on and up to date…

I performed some Bing search but no result about this subject. So I installed the service manually. Just run this command:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe /LogFile="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\TfsJobAgent\TfsJobAgent.InstallLog" /LogToConsole=true /username=Domain\ TFSSERVICE /password=PSW TFSJobAgent.exe

After that the service was listed in the services window (services.msc)

All alerts were fired; the reporting was refreshed and displayed all the data. The event viewer was started to be filled with TFS notifications (informations, not errorsJ)

TFS Policy Overrides Report

RoyRose — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:47:00 GMT

Summary

Managers and Team leaders that work with TFS track the project's progress through reports.

Reports such as Requirement Overview, Requirement Progress and Burn Down and Burn Rate analyze Work Items and display the team progress.

When developers check-in, they should link their changesets to work item(s). To help and make developers remembering this, we use check-in policies such as Work Item policy and Comments policy.

Although this data exists in TFS, there is no way to see the check-in policy overrides amount and users who made them. We need a tool for that, that gets the data from the API.

So I created a report for that J

Check In Policy Overrides Report

This report is a simple TFS report that displays the check-in policy overrides that were made in a date range. You only need to enter that date range that by default it takes the last week.

The report has 3 parts:

· Upper left part – displays all check in amount that was made in the date range and the number of overrides as well.

· Upper right part – displays a small pie with all team members that override a check in policy.

· Middle part – changesets with policy override details

You can download the report from here

Don't forget to set its data source to TfsReportDS in the Reporting Services site

How to Create Better Unit-Testing with Microsoft Moles Framework Part II

RoyRose — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:44:00 GMT

This post is part II of Moles Framework, if you did not read part I (Moles overview and how to use Stubs) you can find it here.

In my previous post I explain how can we use Stubs to fake a class that implements an interface.

We also learnt that Stub uses virtualization technique (like OOP) to achieve isolation.

Moles Framework - Moles

But what if our DAL class does not implementing an interface…?

Of course we don't use interfaces in all our code, how can we still gain isolation without interface? Moles! Or M J

Remember that after adding Moles assembly we had 2 types of classes: S and M:

The M is for Mole.

Mole class is the one that really does a great trick!

First, it does not use virtualization technique as Stubs but Instrumentation. Just like code coverage for instance.

When a test uses Mole class while running, the Mole object redirects the method's address to a new fake method we implemented

We don’t need to create a class for that (like a Stub or a Mock object), we use AllInstances object property instead:

This unit test can be a little bit confusing because we don't really change the dal property of the Manager object; moreover, I even used Manager and not its accessor.

Here I used MResourceReader object and its AllInstances property. It means that when a test is executed, all the instances of ResourceReader within the test environment that will be loaded into memory, will replace the GetFileContent methods address to my new one…

Note:

· In order to tell the MSTest framework to use moles and to do its trick, we use HostType attribute.

· In the last unit test above, GetFileContentString delegate signature accept 2 parameters. The first one is of Capito.BranchUtility.DAL.ResourceReader type - unlike the real GetFileContent method that accept only one string parameter. Because we use AllInstances property, Moles come for help again and pass the DAL object as variable to the extension method (see above (dal, s ) => …) so we can use its properties\methods if we want.

· You can also Mole static methods – in this case you don’t use AllInstances but the M class alone:

MResourceReader.StaticMethofString = ….

How to Create Better Unit-Testing with Microsoft Moles Framework Part I

RoyRose — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:33:00 GMT

Introduction

Unit testing is something that we all do, even if we don't really use any framework for that such as MS Test or NUnit. If we're writing class library we usually create another console application project to test the methods and the behavior of the new classes.

You can read my previous post about writing TDD and unit tests in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 here.

One of the goals of unit testing is isolation. When we unit test a method, we usually want to check that it behaves as accepted, without any other objects to interfere. For example, let's take a very simple scenario:

We want to test GetInfo method (in Manager Class inside our BL) that calls GetFileContent method in DAL library.

When we test GetInfo, we want to check that it returns a valid result according to our inputs, but we also want to achieve isolation – meaning, we don’t want to be depend on ResouceReader object. We don't want our test to pass or fail due to GetFileContent result. How can we achieve this? How can we achieve isolation?

Before Moles Framework

In order to detour DAL.ResourceReader.GetFileContent method, we need to somehow replace the real DAL object (m_dal) in the BL.Manager object to a fake one that its implementation of GetFileContent is no more than 1 safe line… By saying "safe" I mean that it won't do anything "dangerous" such as reading from a resource that can\might fail. Because our ResourceReader class is implementing an interface (IResourceReader), we can create a new class in the test project that implements IResourceReader and its GetFileContent. Then we can use Private Accessor of the Manager object to set m_dal to our fake object.

This technique is called Mocking. Here is an example:

One disadvantage of regular Mock objects is that we'll need to create number of mock objects that implement GetFileContent method differently. The example above implements GetFileContent that returns an empty string. We need another implementation that will return NULL, the file name, etc in order to test GetInfo completely. that's where Moles come in…

Moles Framework

A new pet in town! With Moles framework we can easily test objects and methods and detour other methods and objects to achieve isolation.

Moles is a test stub and detour framework that can be downloaded for free here

Moles offer 2 techniques to achieve isolation

· Stubs

· Moles

Moles Framework - Stubs

In order to create a fake DAL, let's first add Moles Assembly to the project we want to detour, in our case the DAL:

After compilation, a new assembly is referenced in our test project: Capito.BranchUtility.DAL.Moles.

Check this assembly namespace and you see that it has 2 major classes that starts with S and M. The S is for stub:

Stub uses Virtualization technique – that means it uses OOP to achieve isolation…pretty similar to what we just did with Mock objects.

S classes are used mostly for Interfaces. The SIResourceReader is a class that looks like the real one but all its properties and methods are actually delegates! We can create new "implementation" to all the methods we want in that object without creating new class for that… in example:

The selected code demonstrates how I created a fake stub object and with extension method (delegate) I gave an implementation to GetFileContent method.

Note: The GetFileContentString delegate ends with String – that's meant to support method overloading.

But, What about M ? Read the next post here about Moles

Manually Configure and Run code Coverage

RoyRose — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:31:00 GMT

There is an option to configure and run code coverage manually for running manual tests such as test cases with Microsoft Test Manager. It can be done with few command line actions that need to be run. Here are the actions:

· Run VSInstr.exe to replace the DLL\PDB files with the instrumented ones

· Run VSPerfCmd.exe to start the code coverage

· Run VSPrefCmd.exe to stop code coverage

VSInstr.exe

In order to instrument our DLL(s), let's run the command(s):

· VSInstr.exe "AssemlbyFile.dll" /coverage

After running, you can see that VSInstr.exe created the following files:

· AssemblyFile.dll.orig

· Assembly.Instr.pdb

Actually, VSInstr renamed the original AssemblyFile.dll to AssemblyFile.dll.orig and created new instrumented AssemblyFile.dll (See its size – much larger…)

Also, it created an instrumented pdb.

Note: You can run VSInstr command multiple times for each assembly (DLL\EXE)

VSPerfCmd.exe

To start logging the coverage, we use VSPerfCmd command with start\shutdown arguments:

· VSPerfCmd.exe /start:coverage /output:Test.coverage

That's it! Now we are ready to run our tests. When finished, we need to shutdown the coverage action:

· VSPerfCmd.exe /shutdown

You can look and find coverage file (in our case Test.coverage), just drag it to Visual Studio and it'll open in the Code coverage Window.

Important: usually, you can open Visual Studio Command Prompt and run the commands from there, but if you are on 64bit machine, the Test.Coverage file will be empty and you might get this error:

"Empty results generated: none of the instrumented binary was used"

That's because you need to run the command from x64 folder:

· For x32 the folder is: <VSDir>\ Team Tools\Performance Tools

· For x64 the folder is: <VSDir>\ Team Tools\Performance Tools \x64

I've create a small console application that loads all information from XML files and executes the commands above, it may help if you have more than one assembly to instrument and instead of running the VSInstr action multiple time, you can just update the XML and run the app. Here it is have fun

Process Template Comparer

RoyRose — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:54:00 GMT

Introduction

Configuration managers in companies that use TFS need the ability to manipulate and change work Item templates according to the company's methodology.

With Microsoft Process Template Editor that comes within Visual Studio Team Foundation Power Tools, we can edit work item templates: add new fields, change the UI and the state machine of work items and fit it to the company needs. All the sets of the customized work items, source control rules and build templates gathered and called process template.

The best practice is to have one process template in our organization so all development teams use it and obey all rules inside it. Multiple process templates in medium-sized companies can caused disorder in the development. Developers that work is cross teams or even move from one team to another will need to learn the new methodology of the team as if they move to new company…

In large scale companies, configuration managers usually have more than one process template.

When changes are made in the organization methodology and we need to update work items, we first need to compare between the current work items in Team Projects, to view the differences between them. Compare tools like the one that comes within Visual Studio can compare work items because they are XML based, but still cannot give full comparison overview and explain what the differences are.

Process Template Comparer

Process template comparer is a tool that was written to ease the comparison that configuration managers usually do with primitive tools. This tool gives the following features:

1. Compare between Team Projects work items

2. Full comparison overview that shows where the differences are

3. Drill-down option that shows the changes in 4 categories:

· Fields

· States

· Transitions

· UI

o Groups

o Tabs

Main Window

Choose the base team project to compare with the rest of the Team Projects.

Ignore option – We can ignore fields that we don't want to include in our comparison.

After clicking compare, a list box with results is filled.

The result view is displayed with all team projects that were chose. Each team project explains what the differences are: how much different work items and how much same or missing work items compared with the based Team Project.

When expanding the team project node, we can view the work items that missing, different or same. Clicking View button will displays the result in more details:

About Next Version

The next version of Process Template comparer will have the following features:

· Comparing by process template – the current version can compare between Team Projects, the next version will have the option to compare Team Projects with Process Templates that defined in TFS (i.e. Compare Team Projects with MSF for CMMI v5 Process Improvement).

· Coloring options for compare results

· Export compare results to Excel

Update Work Item Check-in policy

RoyRose — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:39:00 GMT

Managers and team leaders that work with TFS use Work Items to track and monitor the team's work and progress.

Work Items are based-work-packages that define scope of work for a team member, a work item can be a developer task, investigation task and test task.

With work items team leaders can watch and track of his team and the project progress. 2 important fields that I like to mention are Remaining-Work and Completed-Work; these fields show the real status of a task progress.

When a developer finishes his task and likes to perform check-in to the changed code, he links the work item that describes the work that was done to the code. After that (or before) he needs to update the 2 field to report how much time is left to completely finish the task and how much hours completed.

It's not an easy task for developers… because these fields cannot be updated while check-in. only before or after. That's why I created a custom check-in policy that allows developers to update these fields while check-in. My custom check-in policy is a small window that pops up after pressing check-in button in the pending changes window. The window displays all work items (that are linked to the check-in) as tabs, each tab contain Remaining-Work and Completed-Work fields. The developer must update his work by changing the fields in all tabs.

After using my Update work item check-in policy, team leaders can use and read reports such as requirement progress, Burn down and burn rate and Status on all iterations

Go here to read more and download

Log Build Messages in Custom Build Activity in Team Build 2010

RoyRose — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:27:00 GMT

In TFS 2008 when we create custom tasks (inherits from Task class), we get a log object which helps us log messages into the log file of the build (with LogMessage method).

In TFS 2010 the Team Build is based on workflow, so when we create a code activity we inherit from Activity class that does not contain log object. Not even a log method. Instead, we have context object (of CodedActivityContext class) that has Track method that can execute another activity.

We can Create new WriteBuildError Activity object (from the toolbox) and pass it to Track method. When running the build, we will have new line in the build log with our message.

A better way to do it is to use Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities namespace that contains extension methods for the context. After adding the using statement, you'll notice 3 new methods of the context called TrackBuildError, TrackBuildWarning and TrackBuildMessage. Enjoy!

Team Build 2010: Copy each solution into separate directory inside drop location folder?

RoyRose — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:34:00 GMT

Most of my customers want their Drop Location folders organized in sub-folders for each solution instead of getting all DLLs\EXEs in one massy folder.

Instead of customizing csproj as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2784335/how-can-i-get-tfs-2010-to-build-each-project-to-a-separate-directory and http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/tfsbuild/thread/a62a6f98-ec44-46c1-a0d0-7f441f0db973 suggest, you can update the template of your build and change the output directory to the one you want.

First, open the XAML template and drill down to the compilation activity:

You have Run-MSBuild-for-Project activity. In the Properties window check out the OutDir parameter – That's the one you want to change!

By default, this parameter has outputDirectory variable which directs to Binaries folder of the build in the build machine.

i.e I created a build name TestBuild.

The default OutDir value is D:\Builds\4\Project2010\TestBuild\Binaries

Now, for creating a new folder for each solution, update OutDir parameter with this code:

System.IO.Path.Combine(outputDirectory, System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(localProject))

The Build Will automatically copy OutDir content to the DropLocation folder. Have Fun

Custom Build Activities and TF215097 Error

RoyRose — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:43:00 GMT

TFS 2010 Build Automation can be customized by creating custom WF activities.
The net is already full with how-to articles like this one:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimlamb/archive/2009/11/18/how-to-create-a-custom-workflow-activity-for-tfs-build-2010.aspx

When I tried to queue the build, I got this annoying TF215097 error:

TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition "Cannot create unknown type '{clr-namespace:BuildTasks;assembly=BuildTasks}'"

To solve this, you need to open the WF XAML build in notepad and check the xnmns attribute ofthe custom activity.
The Visual Studio IDE only uses:
clr-namespace:BuildTasks
Instead of:
clr-namespace:BuildTasks;assembly=BuildTasks

So, just add ;assembly=BuildTasks and it will work for you too.

Upgrade WSS 2.0 to 3.0 with Hardware move

RoyRose — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:09:00 GMT

Upgrading TFS WSS 2.0 to 3.0 Process

As you already know, one of the TFS 2010 prerequisites is WSS 3.0.

Besides that, if you upgrade TFS 2005 to 2008, you should also upgrade WSS to 3.0. From a huge amount of posts over the internet, WSS upgrade is the most difficult thing when you upgrade TFS. I wanted to help you a little and provide some details with an upgrade I made a few days ago.

Basic Infoformation:

· TFS 2008 with SP1

· 70 something Team Projects

· WSS 2.0

· 2 application tiers

· 2 data tiers with cluster

Goal:

To Upgrade WSS 2.0 to 3.0

How:

That's the catch, because of my luck of knowledge in WSS I've decided to create WSS 2.0 server in a testing environment. I got 2 servers one for the data and one for the application (similar to the real TFS environemnt) I restored the STS_Content_TFS database in the data server, install WSS 2.0 in the application server and configure it to work with the restored STS_Content_TFS.

(The testing WSS 2.0 automatically creates STS_Config_TFS database for its inner configurations).

After 15 minutes or so, I had WSS 2.0 working in testing environment with all sits from the production. Believe it or not – this was the easy part.

You can read the post of the WSS upgrade process in Neno Loje site: http://msmvps.com/blogs/vstsblog/archive/2008/05/11/screen-gallery-upgrading-wss-2-0-to-wss-3-0.aspx

Basically the steps I needed to do were:

Run prescan.exe /all
Install .Net 3.5 + SP1 (WSS 2.0 does not need .Net 3.5 but WSS 30 does)
Install WSS 3.0 (chose in place upgrade + web front end)
Configure WSS Central Administration port (I chose 17013 + NTLM)

Seems easy well, NOT!

Prescan.exe /all tool must run before you install WSS 3.0.But it kept on failing with this weird error in the log:Error: The following site has not been scanned. Id = GUIDE and Url = / Checking if any list has not yet been scrubbed in Server="DATATIERNAME";Database="STS_Content_TFS";Trusted_Connection=yes;App="prescan.exe". Prescan has encountered sites or lists that were not updated because they cannot be accessed using the SharePoint Products and Technologies object model

Look at that URL: / - what's that…?!?

After digging Bing (and Google…) I've decided to delete 2 rows in Sites table and Webs table in STS_Content_TFS database. Yes! With SQL Server Management Studio I deleted 2 rows in Sites and Webs with Id=GUIDE:

SELECT *FROM Sites

WHERE Id = GUIDE

SELECT *FROM Webs

WHERE SiteId = GUIDE

I did not know what those rows were – the FullUrl was http://localhost which is not a site.

After that the prescan.exe /all passed with no errors and the upgrade succeeded…almost J

It fail while upgrading – mean I came as far as ever – to the UpgradeStatus.aspx – this page refreshed every 1 minute and tells you the upgrade status.

After 20 minute I saw a red line with a path to upgrade.log file.

I skim the file and get this error:

CanUpgrade [SPContentDatabase Name=... Parent=SPDatabaseServiceInstance] failed.[SPManager] [ERROR]: The pre-upgrade scan tool has not yet been run on this database SPContentDatabase Name=.... Parent=SPDatabaseServiceInstance. You must run the pre-upgrade scan tool before you can continue with the upgrade process. Run the tool from the following path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\prescan.exe.

But I did! L What is the problem??– Sure I did something bad – deleting rows from the database – what did I expect…

Trying with Microsoft support and nothing – I roll back the testing environment (data\WSS) 10 times trying to upgrade the damn thing with nothing.

Than I remembered I have a production environment, let's try prescan.exe /all there… it updates the database but does nothing to the data.

Guess what, it went with no errors at all in the first time. I need not delete rows at all. That left me with some more question marks…

Than I got it!!!

Entering the STS_Config_TFS database in the production environment I saw that Sites table (yes, also Site table in STS_Config_TFS) contains a row with url - / (!!!)

To confirm it – I open the browser and navigated to http://TFS site – there is a WSS site there!!!

When I try to go to http://TESTING_WSS site it gave me 404 page not found!

All this time I thought the problem was the TFS-WSS special configuration or prescan.exe or upgrade process when all the time the problem was the Config database – that somehow not created a / site in Sites table…

Again, with SQL Server management I open the STS_Config_TFS.Sites table, and add new row with the same GUIDE (I mentioned earlier) and than the upgrade process went smooth!

After 3 weeks TFS WSS 2.0 upgrade to 3.0 in the production environment J

Implementing Test Driven Development using Visual Studio 2010

RoyRose — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 02:34:00 GMT

Ten days before developer academy 4 in Israel, I've decided to give some information about my 30 minutes demo presentation about Test driven development in visual studio 2010.

As you already noticed, this is also my first post here in Microsoft Blog. Here you'll find information and code snippets about Visual studio Team system. Hope you'll find it useful.

I'm going to start (as I'll start in dev academy) with some definitions

What is a unit test?

Unit test is a piece of code that verifies and validates a method. When a developer writes unit tests he checks his code to ensure it behaves as he wanted.

Today, almost all devices are unit tested. The device components are getting checked before combing them all together and before integration tests starts.

My conclusion to this is that we, the developers, need to create unit tests to our code also.

A unit test's goal is KISS – keep it simple and stupid... When writing a unit test keep in mind that it should be no more than 4 rows of code. You don't want to create bugs in those and you want it to help other developers understand your application logic.

So, what is TDD?

TDD is a development technique invented by Kent Beck that simply says: first write a unit test then, after the test fails, write the production code to pass that. TDD has 3 simple steps that you need to follow in order to make the development easy: Red, Green and Refactor.
Red means write a failing unit test.
Green means write the production code to make the unit test pass.
Refactor – change production code as needed.

Visual Studio 2010 finally gives the developers the ability to write test driven code. With newer IDE (yes, WPF UI!) and improved testing framework we can write our code in TDD.

To demonstrate TDD in visual studio 2010 I've created memory game application. This game contains N*N board with cards, the user's goal is to reveal 2 cards with the same picture in one turn.

Figure 1 – Memory game board with 2 revealed cards

For start I add a Class library project for the game logic and a test project for unit tests. The class library will contain 2 base classes:

Board – represents game board that contains all game logic
Card – represents game card

The board contains score property that must be set to zero when creating new board object.

I created a unit test that checks score property:

[TestMethod]
public void Board_CheckScoreValue_ReturnZero()
{
    int size = 4;
    Board board = new Board(size);
    Assert.AreEqual<int>(0, board.Score);
}

As I mentioned earlier, writing TDD using Visual studio 2010 is simple. Even thought visual studio does not recognize my new class Board, the intelli-sense is smart enough to realize that I'm writing TDD so it gives me the option to create it:

Figure 2 – Visual Studio 2010 smart intelli-sense

To create Board class just use the smart tag, or with ctrl + . (dot) to generate the class

Figure 3 – Smart tag to auto generate new class

After adding the class, the constructor and Score property with the smart tag help, you can run the test to check it's failed from the test list view and test result view – end of red phase.

Figure 3 – Test View and Test Result view

In green phase you need to write code to make the unit test pass. Use impact test view to check which unit test you need to re-run after changing the production code.

Figure 5 – Test impact view – which tests should I run after changing code?

Now, test result displayed my passed test – end of green phase.

More about TDD in developer academy 4.

You can download memory game sample here.