PDC09 – FT60: A Lap Around Visual Studio and TFS 2010

This post is part of my PDC09 Conference Notes series. These are my raw notes taken while watching the various session videos from PDC09. Refer to my original post for some conventions I tried to use.

FT60 – A Lap around Visual Studio and TFS 2010

• Planning
  • Excel workbook for planning Iteration (for a specific Area?)
  • Calculates # of working days based on Start and End Date
  • Supports holidays and other non-working days by using the Interruptions sheet
  • Capacity Planning graphs
  • Looks like working in Excel is a much better (almost preferred) experience in 2010.
  • Reports (at least the capacity report) was updated right away, no waiting for warehouse to refresh.

• Hierarchical Work Items
  • As the name implies, you can setup hierarchies with your work items (kick ass!)
  • Query support for hierarchical work items, allows you to define a query for the top level item, and a second query for the child work items (I have to think that this feature was added as a direct result of MS dog fooding TFS).

• Develop in Parallel
  • Branch visualization
    • Branches now show up as a “special” folder in Source Control viewer
    • View Hierarchy (Right click on branch) allows you to view the branches and their relationships in a graphical view. You can add a description for the branch
    • Drag and Drop merges
  • Change tracing
    • Combine branch visualization with change sets, you can see which branches were affected by a given change set. Arrows show stuff like merge directions.
  • Actionable History

• Continuous Integration
  • Gated Check-in
    • Verify code via a shelved check in set before something gets actually checked in.
    • Seems somewhat redundant with proper branches for development, but I guess it’s another way to solve the problem. Although I think that you should be running most of the tests locally before even trying to check in.
  • Architecture Diagrams
    • Map actually code assemblies (projects) to a block diagram.
    • Blocks are for things like Web Layer, Business Layer, Data Layer etc.
    • You can setup dependencies between the blocks, like Web Layer depends on Business Layer.
    • You can verify that code does not break the dependencies you have outlined in the block diagram (i.e. don’t have a business component that references the web component).
  • Visual Work Flow (WF) designer for builds looks a lot better then editing XML, but we all know that Microsoft rarely demos stuff that has been tested in the real world.
  • Build Reports are improved, more information with direct links to the information in TFS that you need to get more details. Hopefully less digging around the build output folder.
  • New SysTray app that notifies you about build events

• Project Visibility and Health
  • Nice graphs in MOSS. Do they work in WSS?
    • Burndown
    • User Stories vs. Tasks
  • Graphs build on Web Parts so you can customize the page layout. Also change parameters passed to reports.

• Manageability
  • TFS Basic Install
  • New Admin Console written WPF. Looks like MMC.
    • Ports, URL’s, etc
    • One click change TFS account password
    • View logs