I’m doing a lot of work with Work Item Type Definitions and for those that don’t know the Visual Studio SDK includes schemas for these that can be used in Visual Studio (and other XML editors) to provide Intellisense capabilities.

Rob Caron blogs about this here. For those that don’t want to download the whole SDK he also provides a direct download of just the schemas.

I just ran into an issue where I right-clicked a Web Site Project in Visual Studio 2008 and chose Property Pages and then tried to remove a reference. However, whenever I clicked the Remove button the dialog just flashed and the reference remained.

The issue turned out to be that the web.config file (where the reference information is stored) was read-only. Making the file read-write again solved the issue.

A new version of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools has now been released.

This version of the Power Tools is targeted at Visual Studio Team System/Team Foundation Server 2008 only so be aware that this version will not work with 2005.

In addition to support for 2008 this version also boasts a number of new and very useful features:

1. Navigate to Windows Explorer which opens Windows Explorer to the folder corresponding with the current folder in the Source Control Explorer. Additionally, this can be bound to a keyboard shortcut!
2. Find in Source Control which allows you to find items based on status or wildcards. Hopefully, we’ll see a version of this in the future that can search contents as well.
3. Build Notification which is a system tray utility to notify you about the status of builds. Jim Lamb blogged about this some time ago.
4. DestroyWI and DestroyWITD which allow you to remove work items and work item type definitions. This is invaluable if you are creating or customising your own work item types.
5. The Process Template Editor can now be run standalone outside of Visual Studio.
6. Annotate, TreeDiff, annd TestToolsTask have been removed because they’re now part of 2008.

Brian Harry discusses some of these features on his blog.

I’ve raised a number of feature requests on Connect for the “Rosario” release of TFS/VSTS. If you think any of these are valuable please vote for them:

Single Item Link Control

Business Rule to Restrict Area and Iteration By Depth

Save As for Test Plan

Bulk Add Test Passes

Restrict Work Item Linking

Camano: Assign Test Passes and Test Suites to Individuals

I decided that I’d put off the upgrade to TFS Service Pack 1 for long enough and did the upgrade on our production server yesterday.

The good news is that it went very smoothly and the only hiccup I encountered was actually related to installing SQL Server Service Pack 2 (which we chose to do at the same time). The problem was simply that there wasn’t enough space available on the system drive to complete the installation.

For those of you that are interested the process I followed is:

1. Take a snapshot of the virtual machine.
2. Stop IIS (iisreset /stop).
3. Perform a full backup of all of the SQL Server databases.
4. Start IIS (iisreset /start)
5. Install Windows Powershell (required by the TFS Best Practice Analyzer).
6. Run the TFS Best Practices Analyzer.
7. Install the Quiescing GDR on the TFS server and the TFS proxy.
8. Install TFS Service Pack 1 on the TFS server.
9. Install TFS Service Pack 1 on each of the build machines.
10. Install TFS Service Pack 1 on the TFS proxy.
11. Test.

I also performed a couple of extra steps:

1. Install SQL Server Service Pack 2.
2. Install Team System Web Access.
3. Modified the Work Item Changed XSL to link to Team System Web Access.
4. Install hotfixes for the 2 issues we’ve come across.

1. FIX: Error message when you perform a merge operation in Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server: “TF14087: Cannot undelete because not all of the deletion is being undeleted”.
2. FIX: When the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Adapter adapter processes a changeset, the adapter may fail in Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.

1. Because we’re using a single server configuration we’re testing whether there will be a performance improvement by restricting SQL Server’s memory to ensure that there is memory left for the application “tier” and the OS.