Brian Harry's Blog

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October 2007 - Brian Harry's Blog

Final word on unexpected VS 2008 Beta 2 expirations

October 30, 2007 Oct 30, 2007 10/30/07
Brian Harry
The final mitigation for our unexpectedly expiring VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 Beta 2 VPC is now in place.  Yesterday we uploaded new VPC images with the expirations changed.  Again, remember that the issue only affects VPC images.  If you installed the actual setups, there will not be any early expiration issue. You can read more about...

Bug handling on Connect & Transparency

October 29, 2007 Oct 29, 2007 10/29/07
Brian Harry
I've blogged a fair about over the past couple of years on transparency in our process.  I've also advocated for it a great deal internally.  This post caught my eye today both because it is a great commentary on transparency and a great description of how we handle bugs that customers enter throught the http://connect.microsoft.com ...

Team System Widgets

October 29, 2007 Oct 29, 2007 10/29/07
Brian Harry
I think I blogged about this site a couple of years ago but they recently improved it and it's worth another mention.  This is the best site I've ever seen for finding a handy list of the multitude of additional Team System add-ons.  I frequently complain to our marketing team asking "Why can't we have a list as good as theirs?" :).&...

Error in VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 Beta 2 expiration date

October 29, 2007 Oct 29, 2007 10/29/07
Brian Harry
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Beta 2 expiration date saying that it would expire in March 2008.  Well, for the non-VPC version that continues to be true, however, we have discovered that the OS image in the VPC is set to expire on Thurs, November 1, 2007 - only a couple of days from now and well before the March date that we ...

TFS plugin compatibility between TFS 2005 and TFS 2008

October 19, 2007 Oct 19, 2007 10/19/07
Brian Harry
As I've written many times, we strove to maintain a very high degree of compatibility between TFS 2005 and TFS 2008.  One result is that either client can be used with either server.  However, our success was not without exceptions.  One of those is that any code you've compiled against the TFS 2005 object model will always run ...

TFS 2008 System Recommendations

October 18, 2007 Oct 18, 2007 10/18/07
Brian Harry
We have just completed our testing for TFS 2008 scalability and are ready to publish the final recommendations on server sizing and hardware configurations.  If you want to compare this to the TFS 2005 recommendations, you will find them here. Ultimately making capacity recommendations is a little like throwing darts at a board.  The...

Final set of TFS test patches released

October 16, 2007 Oct 16, 2007 10/16/07
Brian Harry
Over the weekend we released the final set of TFS 2008 test patches for Beta 2 (see below for links).  As I described in an earlier post, these patches fix real bugs but are primarily to allow us to test our servicing process and make sure that by the time TFS 2008 ships we are able to quickly release reliable patches with a good ...

TeamCompanion – A new TFS Add-on for Outlook

October 15, 2007 Oct 15, 2007 10/15/07
Brian Harry
Check out TeamCompanion by Ekobit.  It's a new Outlook add-on that allow you to work with TFS work items inside Outlook.  In addition to email integration and you favorite Outlook list management features, it also provides read-only offline access to you work items.  They have a 30-day free trial here.  Try it out and let ...

Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF)

October 11, 2007 Oct 11, 2007 10/11/07
Brian Harry
We recently did a small reorg and my team is now responsible for the MSF components that ship in Visual Studio Team System.  This means I now need to understand it even better than I do now and work to make sure it's delivering everything you want.  Coincidentally, Jeff Beehler wrote a post asking for feedback on MSF.  I'd ...

Team Foundation Operations Guide

October 3, 2007 Oct 3, 2007 10/3/07
Brian Harry
Yesterday Jeff Beehler announced the availability of a new Team Foundation Server Operations Guide.  This guide was assembled by the VSTS Rangers team in coordination with the TFS team.  It augments the product documentation with additional guidance and best practices for managing/operating a Team Foundation Server. It includes...