PL-SQL Developer Integration with Team System Source Control

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider was released two weeks ago. It enables integrated use of Team Foundation Version Control from various systems that do not support tight integration with Team Explorer. TFS MSSCCI provider declare support for 9 tools:

TFS Permission Manager 1.5 - Upgrade

After receiving a lot of very good feedback about TFS Permission Manager, I finally found some time to add missing functionality. New version supports group permission management. Also, following request from Microsoft guys GNU license was switched to more permissive Berkley license.

Download available from the same place, you do not need to uninstall previous version, just run new setup.

I hope it will be helpful. Any thoughts or suggestions will be greatly appreciated (as always :-)).

3rd party assemblies in TS Build

Here's something I stumbled upon trying to build a few solutions using the TFSBuild process.

I had a typical solution. It contained some projects, which referenced one another, and a few prebuild assemblies. 3^rd party .NET assemblies needed to compile some of the projects in the solution. These assemblies were not in the source control.

Each developer had them on a network drive on his machine. Assemblies like the Janus assemblies, the entlib assemblies which you find in every second project you see and a few other familiar and unfamiliar ones.

The problem here of course, is that these assemblies are not located on the build machine on the same path, and since the build process' service uses a different user name I wanted these assemblies to sit in a predefined directory on the machine.

There are few options to handle this case. One of them is to use the HintPath:

<ItemGroup>

  <Reference Include="System.Workflow.Activities, Version=3.0.00000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL">

<HintPath>C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0.00000.0\Windows Workflow Foundation\System.Workflow.Activities.dll</HintPath>

    <Name>System.Workflow.Activities</Name>

    <SpecificVersion>True</SpecificVersion>

    <Aliases>global</Aliases>

    <ExecutableExtension>.dll</ExecutableExtension>

  </Reference>

This might solve my problem, but it forces me to keep editing the build file for every assembly that I add.

Another solution could be to use the AdditionalReferencePath, but i won't discuss it here.

Another cool resolution to this problem was found after I explored the build process a little.

It turns out that the MSBuild is quite smart, and it looks for linked assemblies in quite a few places before giving up.

The MSBuild is looking for a file with a name of the assembly, followed by an extension of exe or dll in a specific order defined on the targets file

The default search order is this:

• Files from the current project – indicated by {CandidateAssemblyFiles}. 
• $(ReferencePath) property that comes from .user/targets file.
• $(HintPath) indicated in the original proj file
• Target framework directory.
• Directories found in registry that uses AssemblyFoldersEx Registration.
• Registered assembly folders, indicated by {AssemblyFolders}.
• $(OutputPath) or $(OutDir) of the build project (bin folder)
• GAC 
• The reference item include attribute as if it were a complete file name. {RawFileName}

 This order in the targets file can be reconfigured, though this is not recommended.

Take into consideration that for search paths defined in the registry, components in current user are always preferred over components in local machine and that the current framework target version is preferred over older target version

In my case, I edited the registry.

I added a key in "\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE|Microsoft\.NETFramework\v2.0.50727\AssemblyFolderEx", and set its data to the path of the directory containing my prebuild assemblies.

This did the trick and the MSBuild compiled the problematic assemblies like a charm.

 Roy

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Released

It is all in title :-)

There are 4 separate downloads at VS2005 SP1 home (see at the bottom of the page):

• VS2005 Team Suite SP1
• VS2005 TFS SP1
• VS2005 Express Editions SP1
• VS2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista

There are 2 major improvements in Team System area introduced with SP1:

1. Performance and scale improvements
2. Integration with Excel 2007 and MS Project 2007

Team System Licensing

Apparently this is still kind of mistery...
So, Cross-Posted from here

Israeli Team System User Group

We have finally set the date for the group's first meeting, February 12 at the Dekel hall in Microsoft offices.

The meetings will take place on the second Monday of every month.

Since Leon and me are coordinating the group we will love to hear your thought and feedback about the lectures we plan for the group for the first 6 meetings:

1. Team System - Platform Overview - main components and concept, an introduction to TFS
2. Agile development - How to achieve agile project management through team system
3. Team System testing tools - from bug tracking to load testing, the testers tool box
4. Team System and Project Server connectivity - achieving improved project management (Resources, time, content and quality).
5. Team System Utilities and enhancements - getting to know the real important tools for getting the most of Team System
6. Build Customization and Continues integration - making team build do more (and then, some more)

Also each meeting will contain open Q&A section, which will be our opportunity to resolve some of our everyday TFS problems.

We hope that all the people that e-mailed and talked to us about the need for such meetings will attend :)

If not for the lectures, at least for the  cool giveaways  ....

Pictures from the Team System Event

Here are some pictures from the event.

Annual Microsoft Team System Event in Israel

This coming Wednesday, In Gan Oranim, will take place the most important event for the Team System community in Israel. 

Our team is responsible for two of the lectures; we will discuss two case studies:

Team System and MS-CRM integration  -in Valor, we’ve created a  two-way interface to connect MS-CRM and TFS. The defect information is redirected to the developers and QA people responsible for solving them, once their work is completed the help desk people are notified and the cycle is completed. We will discuss the connector architecture, work items and reports that support the solution.

Configuration Management and Build Enhancements – We will present CM solutions we have implemented for varies customers and the role we believe TFS has in upgrading them. The customer sharing the lecture with us, Clarizen will talk about some cool enhancement to Team Build (multiple version installations, pulling exact test fail information and more…) 

So, if you are around Tel-Aviv this Wednesday, don’t forget to drop by - I have a feeling it is going to be a very interesting event.

DB Dude RTM Available for Download from MSDN