Converting from VSS to TFS 2008 invokes the error TF60014

The last time I was converting from VSS to TFS 2008 I encountered a problem.

After going through the first two steps I had a little problem. The first step, the one that analyzes the database (analyze –fp –v4) went very well. The second step (VSSConverter analyze) was also no problem. The last one was different. We kept getting the message,

“TF60014: The username Domain\UserName in the user map file C: \UserMap.xml is invalid.”

We got this message for each and every user. After scratching my head for a while, I started making changes to the UserMap.xml file. That didn’t work.

The only solution was to add the users manually to the TFS project.

Murphy's Law on TFS Installation

A few days ago I had a very interesting experience that I like to share with you.

I have done some implementation work at a customer's site
and one of the things we had to do is migrating the customer's
Visual Source Safe data base to the Team System Source Control.

If you ever experienced in doing that you will know that the process
is very very long it takes some preliminary actions that alone takes a few hours
(and some curses).

After doing all the preliminary steps it was time to do the real deal, to start the migration.
The hour was 10:30PM and I was ready to go home.
After rechecking that the migration process is running I left it to work during the night so when I get back in the morning it will be finished.
I came in the morning to the customer's site after a good night sleep, took my coffee and went to the computer to see the log file.

The log file showed that the process failed exactly on midnight!

Still I suspected nothing I was just disappointed that I will not be able to go forward by our plan.
I tried to connect to the TFS server to see what happened and I received an error message.

The message was saying that the connection to the server has failed...

After a brief research I found out the cause...

3 months ago the TFS was installed, the person that installed it was very optimistic and installed the trial version thinking that later the license number will be entered but...
The person that installed the server left the company so no one knew that the real license number should be entered, so when I tried to migrate EXACTLY 3 MONTHS after the installation the migration failed because the server closed the connection exactly on midnight.

Lesson learned: put in the license number for he products you install in the installation process!

Code Coverage from Manual Tests

Code coverage is an important tool that provides valuable information that enable you to determine what methods (or even lines of code) that still do not have a suitable test and thus assist on determining the effectiveness of your test efforts

Most people normally use code coverage with automated testing, but there is an even grater value using this tool will performing manual tests.

So, in order to use code coverage from manual tests you need to:

1. Make sure you activate code coverage for your project:

2. Run your manual test from one of the test view

3. Open your application and start going through the test steps

4. After completing your test pass or fail your test

5. Now you can view the test results and the coverage info

6. You can also publish your code coverage as part of the test results and attach it to a build

Customizing Process Templates

When creating a Team Project you have to choose a Process Template. It is Common practice to customize the process to your company needs. If you have one Team Project then this is OK. If you have several Team Projects that work the same, and need the same customizing you can just create a new Process Template.

All you have to do is download an existing process template and customize it, trust me, it will save you a lot of time.

The necessary steps are:

1. Open Visual Studio

2. Go to Team -> Team Foundation Server Settings -> Process Template Manager...

3. Choose one of the existing templates. Download it (Choosing location).

4. Edit the Template (Will be explained in future posts).

5. Go to Team -> Team Foundation Server Settings -> Process Template Manager...

6. Choose Upload, Choose the location.

Remember that if you want to make a new Process Template you have to change the string at ProcessTemplate.xml in <ProcessTemplate> -> <metadata> -> <name> to a new value.

And The Oscar Goes To.....

Yesterday Microsoft Israel held the annual Postcar (Post Oscar) awards.

There were different categories that won an awards (like the most read blog, the most read post and so on)

The winner in the group blog category was.... the SRL Team blog which competed in the same categories with a number of influential blogs.

The award is a great honor for us and it reflects SRL's leading role in ALM & VSTS.

Ever since Sarit and Leon came up with idea of creating the group blog in September 2006, many past and present writers took the time to share their knowledge and experience with the community:

• Leon Langleyben
• Sarit Tamir
• Roy Elimelech
• Evgeny Panor
• Andry Kadshan
• Maor David
• Guy Kolbis
• Elad Green
• Katy Sapozhnikov
• Gili Eylon
• Gilad Lavian
• Shahar Bracha
• Vilensky Alex
• Yigael Oscar
• Irena Chernov
• Dan Morgenstern
• Eran Ruso

We hope to keep providing the community with more great posts and share with you our experience and passion.

Enjoy!

Creating a Work Item from an Existing Work Item

Many times we are putting a lot of work in a requirement (or any other type of a work item), filling all the required fields, filling a detailed description, filling all the rest of the fields that are needed for this requirement and after all this work we need to start over to create the next requirement that is just like the previous one with a small change.

So we crash on the keyboard and start crying...

Luckily I have heard your cry and I came for the rescue!!!

There a few ways of creating work items out of existing work items or templates.
On this post I will show how to copy an existing work item in order to create a new work item.

I will demonstrate how to do it with an example.

First I have created a Work Item of type Requirement as shown:

Note: I have created a work item of type requirement but it can be done on all work item types.

Next step we will need to create a query or use an existing query that will show this work item in the results.

We will right click the work item from the query's results list.

We click the "Create Copy of Work Item..." option.

Here we can choose the project in which we like to create the new work item and the work item type we like to create.

It is important to note that we can copy existing work items from project to project has long has they exist on the same Team Foundation Server.

After choosing the project and the type we click the "OK" button.

The result is a new work item filled by the existing work item data.

As I mentioned there are more tricks that can shorten our time when working with working items but more on that on future posts...

Visual studio gets confused between TFS servers