Grant Holliday

Welcome to the second edition of OzTFS Weekly News. After I launched this newsletter last week Rob was quick to link and I’ve only received positive feedback about it.

This newsletter available from my blog feed, or on a separate blog feed:

   http://feeds.feedburner.com/oztfs/

What you can expect to see here is a weekly blog post that summarises the discussions from the list. It will be a great way for busy people to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on the list without the daily chatter.

Don’t forget you can always subscribe to the mailing list yourself, or read the archives on the web.

Subscribers

TFS (beta) Service Pack Released

The biggest news this week around TFS was the release of a beta of Service Pack 1. All the Microsoft guys blogged about it including Brian, Ed, Rob, Buck and even Soma (the DevDiv corporate VP). Be sure to read the SP1 Readme and Known Issues before installing on anything close to production. They’re expecting that the RTM version of SP1 won’t be out for 3–4 months. Brian also gave us a raw dump of all the work items that went into TFS SP1. A great insight into the product!

How to get it

Head on over to http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio and request access. Then they send you an email saying that you’ve been approved, then if you follow that link it shows you the ‘request access’ page. The key step here is to click ‘Sign In’, then you’ll get the actual download links for the TFS SP1 (~41mb)  and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (~372mb).

Is there an upgrade path from SP1 beta to SP1 RTM?

As Brian mentions in the comments on his blog: “Yes, you should be able to uninstall Beta1 and install RTM.”

Are TFS 2005 clients compatible with TFS 2005 SP1 servers and vice versa?

“Yes, the client and server are completely compatible in both directions. That means that you can upgrade the server software independently of your clients.” This is good news! 

Discussions this week

The main topics of discussion this week were around:

• Connecting to multiple TFS servers simultaneously – Basically it’s not possible, but a workaround is to open two instances of Team Explorer.
• TFS Training Material – People are starting to ask how to get up to speed on TFS.
• Keyword Expansion not supported – A quick discussion around $Author and $Date and how to vote for it on MS Connect.
• CAL Pricing – Keith seemed to think that $499 was a bit steep for non-developers.
• Bernardo is still working on his strongly typed WorkItem Object Mapper
• Copying Team Projects from one server to another – Scott is wondering if anybody else has done this and there was no easy answer.

VSTSTechBrekkie – Brisbane 6th/13th/20th/27th October

Anthony is running a free community series on VSTS in Brisbane. All the details can be found at www.vststechbrekkie.com.

TFS Jobs

Since I got a total of 0 people interested in advertising TFS jobs, I’ll put this idea on the backburner for a while.

That’s all for this week. All feedback is welcome. What else do you want me to include?

G.

Welcome to the first edition of OzTFS Weekly News. In another one of my brainwaves and strategic discussion with Coatesy and Darren - I’ve decided to distill the signal from the noise of the mailing list.

It will be available from my blog feed, or on a separate blog feed:

   http://feeds.feedburner.com/oztfs/

What you can expect to see here is a weekly blog post that summarises the discussions from the list. It will be a great way for busy people to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on the list without the daily chatter.

Don’t forget you can always subscribe to the list yourself, or read the archives on the web.

Subscribers

Introductions

I kicked off the list on Monday with a round of introductions. I was surprised to see we have a lot of international subscribers - which is great! We have people from Australia as far as Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Gold Coast. As well as some subscribers from other exotic places including Colorado, Tennessee, Redmond, Germany, India, UK, Denmark, Brazil and Latvia! Keep the introductions coming people.

Tools

Out of the introductions sprung some TFS tools that I’d never even heard of before, including:

• TFS Source Code Version Tree Browser (AKA Vertigo) - Similar to Tortoise SVN or Rational’s version tree browser.
• Project BHAL - Team Management Application for TFS. Uses .NET 3.0 Workflow Foundation to wrap some workflow around TFS work items.
• WorkItem Object Mapper (WOM). Maps TFS WorkItems to Strongly Typed Objects.
• WorkItem Manager tool. Anthony Borton is working on a tool to move work items from one server to another, among other things.

Discussions

The main topics of discussion this week were around:

• Hosted TFS - What are the options available if you don’t want to run your own TFS boxes? Amazon S3 is not one of them - it’s Linux only.
• Database Integration in Builds - how to automatically build a database as part of your build process.
• Code Coverage and Web Applications Projects - how do you get it working?
• Folder structures in TFS Version Control - what’s the “best” way?

TFS Jobs

Are you looking for people with TFS experience? Maybe even a TFS expert? Sick of vague job descriptions from recruiters that won’t tell you the company offering the job?

I’m putting together a TFS jobs board. Contact me if you’d like to advertise a position on the board.

That’s all for this week. Keep it real.

G.

It’s been almost 24 hours since I launched OzTFS.com, the Australian TFS mailing list.

Lots of people have been talking about it:

• I was the first, mwaaha!
• Mitch came a close second, then
• Closely followed by David Lemphers who was up past his bedtime,
• who spread the word like wildfire to Brian Madsen who had the time-difference advantage in Perth.
• Then I lost track as it shot around the Interweb with Anthony Borton and
• Frank joining the party this morning, and
• local VSTS MVP Joe Sango spreading the word.
• Andrew Coates pitched in as well before lunchtime. And best of all
• Rob Caron put up a little note on his blog, which should send the masses coming if it was anything like the traffic I got from TFSBugSnapper.
• Then finally Paul Stovell woke up and subscribed.

We’ve now got 57 subscribers, had ~15 posts which included a welcome email and a round of introductions.

Things are progressing well, however I’m considering doing an evil thing (says uncle Franky) and letting mail-archive.com archive the list, unless somebody can come up with some Mail-to-HTML software quickly.

As Big Kev used to say, “I’m excited” about what tomorrow will bring.

On Saturday morning, I had an idea. It’s now Sunday evening and it’s off the ground.

I’ve started OzTFS.com - a mailing list that brings Australian TFS knowledge and experience direct to your inbox.

Although blogging about your experiences is great, I’ve found that people (who don’t read blogs) are missing out on important information.

An example for me was that people hadn’t heard about the latest TFS Power Tools update. This update included a TreeDiff utility that they could be using - but they didn’t know about it.

When I read this post from Jeff Beehler about TFS communities this morning, I thought it was perfect timing.

Subscribing to the mailing list

Signing up is simple, just send an email to listserver AT oztfs.com with the word “subscribe” in the subject. (or click here)

Or have a read of the vision and future directions on the website: www.oztfs.com

Posting to the mailing list

Posting is simple as well (when you know how). Once you are subscribed, just send an email to listserver@oztfs.com and it will be broadcast to everybody. At the moment I don’t think you “get your own email back” after sending, but I will look into that.

Remember, by default “Reply” will go to the list, if you want to reply to somebody directly you will have to type their email address.

Hopefully this is what the community wants and it will flourish into something that benefits everybody.