Hold on to your seat, this is going to be a long one…
Today at TechEd, I announced Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 and many of the Application Lifecycle Management features that they include. Today, we enabled some of those features on Team Foundation Service for you to try out immediately and I announced that a preview of VS 2013 and TFS 2013 will be available at the Build conference later this month.
It’s an exciting time now that we can start talking more openly about what’s coming in our next major release. As usual, there’s so much I will only be able to just skim the surface with this post. Stay tuned for many more posts on my blog, the ALM blog, the Visual Studio blog and others as we reveal more detailed information about all of the new capabilities. Also check out Soma’s blog for his perspective on today’s announcements. Of course I’ll post again with download links as soon as they are available.
I will not, in this post, be talking about many of the new VS 2013 features that are unrelated to the Application Lifecycle workflows. Stay tuned for more about the rest of the VS 2013 capabilities at the Build conference.
There’s so much new stuff, I’ll try to organize it a bit…
Agile Portfolio Management
We are continuing to build on the Agile project management features (backlog and sprint management) we introduced in TFS 2012 and the Kanban support we added in the TFS 2012 Updates. With TFS 2013, we are tackling the problem of how to enable larger organizations to manage their projects with teams using a variety of different approaches. Our current tooling is focused at individual teams and relies on reporting and Project and/or Project Server integration to roll that up for larger organizations. However, we feel there’s a good opportunity to improve the solution to enable people at all levels of the organization to easily participate in a way that makes sense to them. I sometimes refer to this as “enterprise agile”.
The first problem we are tackling is work breakdown. Different levels in the organization care about different levels of granularity. With TFS 2013, we are addressing this situation by introducing the notion of different levels of backlog. For instance, a backlog of business initiatives can be broken down into a backlog of scenarios and then into a backlog of user stories, etc. You can manage the backlog at each level and trace the relationships. We are also enabling multiple Scrum teams to each manage their own backlog of user stories/tasks that then contributes to the same higher-level backlog.
All of this will be included in TFS 2013 and is available on Team Foundation Service today for you to start to explore. And, as I said, this is just the beginning. My expectation is that we’ll continue to build out our enterprise agile capabilities sprint after sprint and Update after Update over the next year or so.
Version Control
We’ve been hard at work improving our version control solution. There are so many changes that there’s no way I can cover it all so let me cover a few of the top things.
I’m going to start with something that’s a bit of “old news” if you’ve been tracking the Updates. We’ve added a “Connect” page to Team Explorer that makes it easier than ever to manage the different Team Projects/repos you connect to – local, enterprise or cloud. This, among all of the other improvements we’ve made in the Updates, will also show up in VS 2013.
We’ve also built a new Team Explorer home page. It’s a bit more visually appealing and provides access to things like your web based task board. But, my favorite thing of all, is that it includes the list of solutions in your workspace. This gives you an unbelievably nice “home” from which you can navigate to whatever you are looking for. So, as soon as you connect to your Team Project, you can just click on the solution you want to work on and switch between them easily.
Can anyone say…
The #1 TFS request on User Voice. Well, we have, kind of. You can judge whether or not we did a good job. We like the new Team Explorer but we heard the feedback load and clear that it was too cramped for pending changes and you want to be able to see pending changes at the same time as other Team Explorer windows. We also heard that some people prefer the “flat list” of pending changes over the tree view (which was configurable in the old pending changes window).
So, we have introduced “Pop-out Team Explorer pages”.
If you are one of those MANY people who prefer a separate pending changes window, you can click that little arrow on the upper right of Team Explorer and pop-out the page.
At that point, you can dock the pending changes window anywhere you want – like in the old VS 2010 position (like below) or on a different monitor or whatever you like.
I’m soooo happy to have this. And you can “pop out” other pages too (like the build pages). All that said, it’s not perfect yet and let me be candid about that. The pending change page needs a little more work to focus more of the screen real estate on the file list (remember this is still just a preview). Also, not all pages can be popped out. It’s going to stay that way through RTM but we’ll take feedback on priorities as you all start to use it.
Another new feature that I announced today is “lightweight code commenting”. This is a new feature in our web access experience that allows people to easily comment on code. It provides a very nice inline experience for commenting either on whole files or on changes. It has some similarities to our code review feature in VS Premium and may grow up someday but for now, lacks all of the workflow features (creating a code review, managing active code reviews, requesting code reviews, etc) than an actual code review experience would need. The good news is that the two features use the same underlying technologies for managing comments so they can play nice together but they aren’t yet really overlapping features.
Last but not least I want to say again that all of the nifty Git innovation we’ve been doing on Team Foundation Service will ship in our on premises TFS in TFS 2013 and will be available in the preview you can get at Build.
Coding
As always, we’ve also done a bunch of stuff to help people slogging code every day. The biggest thing is a new “heads up display” feature in Visual Studio that provides you key insights into your code as you are working. We’ve got a bunch of “indicators” now and we’ll be adding more over time. It’s a novel way for you to learn more about your code as you read/edit.
The indicators show up as “grey” text in your editor (though it’s not actually text in the file – it’s superimposed). They show you useful information and are then clickable to drill into detail.
Here’s a look at an indicator that shows the places that reference the method you are looking at.
Another indicator shows the status of the tests that test the method you are looking at.
And another indicator shows recent changes to the method you are looking at.
Another big new capability is memory diagnostics – particularly with a focus on enabling you to find memory leaks in production. You can take a memory “snapshot”, load it in VS and then you can explore the heap to understand what memory is being held on to. You can also take two snapshots and compare them (as in the screenshot) here to see what objects changed.
We continue to work hard on creating the most productive development environment in the world – whether it’s reading code, writing code or debugging hard problems.
Testing
All through the VS/TFS 2012 Update cycle, we released constant improvements to our Visual Studio Testing capabilities. In VS/TFS 2013 we take that up a notch with another bunch of new capabilities. First, we continue to build on the new Web based test case management and test execution capabilities we introduced in VS 2012.2.
We’ve been building out the test case management capabilities to allow you to more fully manage your test plans without having to switch to the Test Professional client. You can now create/modify test plans, suites and shared steps on the web
We’ve also improved test editing by enabling you to add step attachments, use shared steps, parameterize step data and more.
And we’ve improved the test running experience making it easier to capture screenshots, etc.
In addition to the next round of improvements to our web based test case management solution, today I announced a preview of a brand new service – cloud load testing. I’m incredibly excited about this new ability. Since VS 2005, we’ve supported Load Testing. It allows you to validate performance, scale and reliability of your server apps. However, you have to set up and configure your own infrastructure to run load tests. With our new Team Foundation Service based load test solution, you can now load test your apps without configuring any infrastructure. Just use Visual Studio Ultimate Edition to create a load test and point it at Team Foundation Service and say Go! And soon you have load test results for your application. We think this is going to be particularly valuable for people building Azure applications who want to verify the scalability of their apps before opening them to a broad user base.
To run a cloud based load test on Team Foundation Service, just create/record a load test and choose the option in your test settings.
And in a short time, you’ll see the progress on your test:
You can’t quite take advantage of this feature yet. While the service side is ready, you are going to need an updated VS client to take advantage of it. You’ll be able to start using it once you download and install the VS 2013 Preview available at the BUILD conference.
Please note the service is in “Preview” and as such we will be limiting the number and size of runs you will be able to do before the service releases. If you would like to join our early adopter program and exercise the service on some larger scale runs, let me know.
Release Management
As teams try to meet the demand for a more rapid release cadence, one of the biggest pain points they are hitting is managing the releases and creating reliable, repeatable automated deployment. Not only that but it’s increasingly hard to manage the number of simultaneously in-flight releases. Quite honestly, we’ve been experiencing that pain ourselves.
At TechEd today, perhaps my biggest announcement was our agreement to acquire the InRelease release management product from InCycle Software. I’m incredibly excited about adding this to our overall lifecycle solution. It fills an important gap that can really slow down teams. InRelease is a great solution that’s been natively built to work well with TFS.
InRelease allows you to manage all of your in-flight releases.
For each release you can define paths that have stages, acceptance criteria, approvals etc.
And you can define an automated deployment pipeline for each application.
This is big news and I’ll have a lot more to say about it in the coming weeks. For now, I just want to let you know that it’s a big addition to our product and over time it will evolve and integrate even more seamlessly with TFS and VS.
Team Collaboration
One of the core value propositions of Team Foundation Server is to help software development teams collaborate. This is usually by providing transparency into what is happening in the software development process so that everyone stays up to date and knows how to make the best decisions. With TFS 2013 we are trying a new tact to facilitate that called “Team Rooms”. A Team Room is a durable collaboration space that records everything happening in your team. You can configure notifications – checkins, builds, code reviews, etc to go into the Team Room and it becomes a living record of the activity in the project. You can also have conversations with the rest of your team in the room. It’s always “on” and “permanently” recorded, allowing people to catch up on what’s happened while they were out, go back and find previous conversations, etc.
As of today, Team Rooms are enabled on Team Foundation Service and when you download the TFS 2013 preview at BUILD, you can also have it in your on premises TFS experience.
Conclusion
As you can see there’s a ton of stuff and I had to carefully filter everything to keep this post from getting even longer. Over the next few weeks I’ll write about some of the other new things we’ve got coming in 2013.
Stay tuned and please share what you think,
Brian
Awesome! Absolutely stunning how you guys manage to deliver value in QU updates and yet have so much more to deliver in the form of VS 2013.
Hi, when we can expect final version of TFS 2013. We are planning migration from TFS2010 to TFS2012 this summer, but It would be great if we could migrate to TFS 2013.
@Slawek, I'm sorry but I don't have a specific release date yet. We' re just saying "this year" with the first preview June 26th. Once we get some feedback from the preview and are able to process that, we'll see if we can't get more specific.
At this point, with our continuous update model, you just have to pick a time and do the update. We keep working on trying to make the update process seamless. We've made more progress in Update 3 on that and will continue to work on it.
Brian
Awesome Job! I Just hope this release fixes the breaking find behavior that 2012 introduced.
Oh, one other piece of data I can share is that the preview later this month will be "go-live". That means we are using it in our production environment and we think it's ready for our customers to as well. That said, it's not at RTM readiness yet so I fully expect to find and fix some additional issues but it's an option you can consider.
Brian
Awesome! I am so excited to download and try as soon as possible.
Congratulations
Any word on if TFS 2013 will allow us to rename team projects?
WOW! Avesome
InRelease has its own web UI, will it be integrated into tfs web access? Also in release uses its own workitem types and we didn't like that…will there be a workitem-less version?
Good Job, I am so excited to download !
Are there any improvements on the team build front? Windows workflow is hard…too hard, team city makes it easy..but they are too expensive.
I'm glad you've done some work on the Pending Changes experience. However, one of the beefs I have with the pending changes UI in VS2012 is that the comment box is now part of the scrollable area.
When I have a large change to commit, I typically scroll through the list of changed files, and build up my comment bit by bit (by looking at the diff for each file then updating the comment). In 2010 this was easy, but in 2012 I can't scroll the files list and see/edit the comment at the same time.
I end up just using notepad to write the comment, then paste it in when I'm done.
It would be good to maybe have an option to "pin" the comment box so it's outside the scrollable area.
Team Room will be integrated with Skype/Lync?
Are there anyways to integrate team room into our enterprise Lync group chat configuration. We need to have chat records be audit compliant. Will it be one team room per project, how can we restrict who can chat, who has read, and if source code items can or cannot be shared in the team room chat?
@Paul, Yes, we've significantly simplified the workflow editing in TFS 2013. We have more work in the pipe to further improve it.
Brian
Can we have video from Skype in the team room?
WOW, really looking forward to InRelease.
Will we be able to have in release work against a mix of TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 servers? Right now we have multiple instances of in release against multiple versions of tfs. Would be nice to consolidate and upgrade the 2010 and 2012 teams to the newer versions of in release as we figure out how to love to TFS 2013. We just finished a third of our upgrade to tfs 2012 across our enterprise.
Nice features coming!
Can't wait to get my hands dirty with the new version.
Awesome! I can't wait to download and try!
@RobSiklos I agree that scrolling the comment area isn't desirable when you have a lot of changes. Another improvement that we made that Brian didn't show above is to virtualize the list of changes inline in the Pending Changes page. This change keeps the comment visible while scrolling through a list of changes. There are still some scenarios where you'll have enough changes to cause the comment to scroll off the top, but you'll have to check it out and let us know what you think when the preview is available for download. Thanks!
Great Features, eagerly waiting for the release…
Will these new smart indicators be usable by 3rd party software as well? We use VisualSVN, and it would be nice if they'll be able to hook the source control related indicators into that.
Also, on the subject of smart indicators- maybe you can provide one at closing braces that shows the text associated with the opening brace? There are some 3rd party add-ons that are supposed to do this, but I've never found them to work very well at all.
Obligatory VS Wishlist:
– Enable writing lambdas during debug time in the immediate/watch windows (use Roslyn!).
– Make a 64-bit version. (R# has a habit of eating through all of VS's memory)
– Make it easier to map the solution structure to a physical file structure. (Every time we add a new project, we have to then delete it from the solution, go to the file structure, move the new folder to where it should appear to begin with, and then re-add it to the solution)
– Clean up the right click context menu.
– Make it possible to add folders to an existing project (drag and drop stopped working for me beginning with VS 2012, but there should be a menu option regardless).
– Finish Roslyn/C# Interactive and ship it with VS 2013.
Any word on what changed for the native C++ compiler (C++11 improvements, etc)?
Nice. You people must have a look at what most win developers are talking about on popular internet forums. It looks like you're only getting feedback from large corporate environments.
news.ycombinator.com/item
Here's a suggested list to have a look at:
1. Support 64bit inline asm
2. Provide something like the ASAN (similar to Valgrind). You do realize that windows is the only OS right now where tools like ASAN should be working.
3. Allow using clang and llvm in the compile chain
4. Allow for VS color style optimization, more than the current one
5. Full C++11 support in Visual Studio.
Great.. so we can't even get 2 years of updates out of VS now… a *new* version a year after the *last* version… gotta love paid upgrades.
There's a UI bug in Visual Studio 2012.
It's in the settings entry, environment, document.
Please fix that.
i.imgur.com/Fh1cIHi.jpg
Don't say you have brought back the pending changes window, even claiming "kind of". You missed the point entirely, of why the new one is so bad compared to the old. Hint: it has nothing to do with its size.
This has just blown my mind, this is awesome.
Brian, please let your teams know, that they ROCK!
FYI, the "old pending changes window" is still there in VS 2012; you just have to access it via the command line. Just open up a command prompt and type "tf checkin" and you'll get the old-style pending changes window for VS 2012. The only problem is there is a bug where it doesn't obey custom checkin policies (go up-vote it at connect.microsoft.com/…/visual-studio-2012-custom-checkin-policies-do-not-work-when-using-tf-exe-checkin-from-command-line)
Is Windows 8 still required? Because I don't *** with that ***, to put it succinctly.
Does this version support XAML 2009? Why are we still using XAML 2006 in 2013?
I'm gonna stand out here alone and say I actually prefer most of the new pending changes window. If only it were easier to switch between TFS projects on it. Picking the associate bug is far easier.
Visual Studio gets better by every release and this too looks very good.
setupVS2012 last week……you know
I'm getting surprised every new release from Microsoft and admiring you more. Keep doing a good job and making our lives easier.
great
@Richard – how would you want Skype to work in the team room?
still the same unusable gray and ugly UI 🙁
Very very cool! I'm very happy with the new enterprise features! Can't wait to implement them! Thanks!
New features look really good. I'm really exited about them.
But the UI is still gray and messy. I really hope you'd stop forcing the Modern UI on us. Visual Studio 2010 had it right.
It is great to see the new functionality around agile portfolio management. Please can you also refer to the thinking around impact mapping with respect to business goals, user goals and impacts (impactmapping.org/index.php) and how this would map into such a feature. I understand the challenges around building a tool to fit everyone's needs but it would be a shame to miss out on the benefits of the research and collaboration that has already gone into this part of agile delivery.
@AaronBjork it would be nice to have a mapping between the team member and his Skype account
it looks very useful
Is there any improvement in CRT and compiler/linker area?
居然没有人用中文评论？国内的程序猿知道的信息太晚了？
其实我啥都没看懂，我是来装逼的！！！！！！！！！！！
Wow,It's very good.I like MS.
Looks like a lot of useless fluff that was designed by some marketing dude. No developer cares about this stuff. WHats going to happen is tons of new threads on msdn forums on how to turn off all this new stuff. Maybe then the IDE doesn't turn into a app that consumes 100% cpu everytime you change a line of code.
Any *actual* improvements to make the code build faster, smaller, … anything like that? Perhaps some thought given to creating a conformant C++11 implementation? You guys are so behind the competition, its a shame.
@AaronBjork I want to be able to click on someone and see them from their webcam…like Skype. We use google hangouts all day long and it's really increased the quality of communication across the team. We've got folks all across the country (USA) and getting to see them (not just email and chat) is compelling. We want chat…but when txt falls short…I want a seamless way to do a "turn around" and get everyone on webcams seamlessly and easily. If the new team room can't do video…well than…that makes the team room into the "chat room"…and not very team friendly.
Still kinda sucks though. Is it finally free or do you still have to pay to be able to code to give you guys more apps?
我靠，都2013了，版本帝。不过一如既往的神一样的编辑器。
Sorry, busy day yesterday so I'll try to get responses out today.
@Blake, I'm asking the team that owns that but I don't actually know what issue you are referring to. If you could provide me more info, that would help.
@Scott Nelson, Putting on flame retardant suit… No. It won't have Team Project Rename. If we don't have Team Project rename by the next major release, I'll hang myself for you.
@Tan Asad, We're working on integration plans now so I can't say exactly what we'll do but, in general, we are motivated to have an integrated experience.
Brian
Some nice features indeed. Any news about C++11?
@DS19, Team Room is not currently integrated with Lync/Skype but it's in the plans. I'd certainly love to hear what specific integration would be important to you. One other thing to know is Team Room has a REST API and supports service hooks for injecting events in the Team Room. We specifically designed it to be very interoperable.
@kevin, No integration yet. Conversations are durable so you have a record of them. By default we create a Team Room per team and all members have read/write access. However, you can control member ship. You can also create arbitrary additional rooms and define who has access to them.
@Adam Siford, Good question, I don't know but I'll take it as a request and pass it on to the team.
Brian
@MgSm88, Eventually the heads up display will be extensible but it's not yet. It's work on the backlog. And thanks for the suggestions.
@Phillip, we will be adding addition C++ 11 support to both the language and the libraries. Stay tuned for more info at the Build conference.
@John, we try to take input from a wide range of customers. Thanks for the suggestions.
@Sebastian, I've passed on the bug report, thanks.
Brian
that's quick! I just installed 2012.3 rc2 and now an announcement about 2013! Keep up the good work! 🙂 can't wait to test the 2013 beta. I hope it has a go live license.
@Greg, I believe we have addressed the most prominent feedback about the pending changes window – the ability to have a separate window from Team Explorer, support for "flat list" mode and a few other usability issues. If you believe we've missed the point, please share what you believe the point is.
@Deadlydog, Passed on the bug report.
@John, I'm not sure what you mean about requiring Windows 8. VisualStudio 2012 supports Windows 7 and higher and so does VisualStudio 2013.
Brian
This is fantastic! Some other teams at Microsoft (Hello WP Team?) need to learn with you guys how to delivery lots of features in so little time!
Good news for us 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Very good news…
Please add design view for Razor code.
The new Agile planning tools look good but are they limited to a single team project? I work in a large organization where we have many team projects. I know that you have espoused "one team project to rule the world" as a philosophy but we tried it and it and it frankly didn't work that well. What we need are enhanced backlog tools that work *across* team projects.
>=C
Just bought 2012 a few weeks ago. Silly me thought, 'Hey they probably won't release another one till 2014 at the earliest right?'
That said if the upgrade fee is reasonable, why not?
I'm a little confused with the nomenclature decision of the Agile Portfolio Management types. I'm surprised to see things like "Goals", "initiatives" and "Features" instead of the agile / scrum terms like "Epics" and "Themes". Was that a conscious decision to not adhere to agile terminology? Would we expect those concepts to be in the Scrum-specific template?
I see a lot of new stuff that much is certain. I have to say this is the first version of VS I have seen that doesn't make me want to upgrade. Hopefully 2012 will still receive the latest updates for Web Tools etc. Those kinds of updates are where the real value is for me.
@Brian
the big point: not having to drag and drop between included and excluded files list
I missed the fact that you added "flat view" – that is great
Same bad and ugly user interface. Please, remove all Modern or Metro UI. Return back old icons. Remove ALL CAPS on Menu (this is a users request on user voice at the same top level that "VS11. Bring back the old "Pending Changes" window"). InRelease not have ALL CAPS (best intelligent designers than Microsoft).
Return back the round borders, transparencies, gradient colors, 3d on scroll bars and controls.
If Microsoft not do this essential things in UI that make a product usefull and allow productivity, Visual Studio with actual UI is improductive, useless and confusing.
Thanks!
Awesome
@Brian: I hate to be a party pooper, but *last* Build conference, the VC++ team told us about all the amazing C++11 features that would be available in VC11 at release, or in a smooth stream of updates.
They're not there yet.
So you're saying we should wait for the *next* Build, where the exact same features will be promised for VC12?
I can't say I'm too surprised (or too fussed, since I mostly use other compilers these days), but hopefully you can understand if "stay tuned for more info from Build" rings a bit hollow?
Hello, I would like to see any news about C++ 11 support. Thanks
Looks really good!
I've been playing around with the Team Room today and there seem to be a few events that you can manage.
But what about switching these on/off
– …entered the room
– …left the room
Fantastic! Can't wait for BUILD.
Hi Guys,
We want C++11 in vs2012 !!! could you please understand that is very hard to port all libraries to the next version of compiler?? please, add support of C++11 to vs2012(yes 12 12 12 )
I wonder what the upgrade story is going to be for those of us who dropped cash for a retail version of VS2012.
cool，when can i get it ?
8 错
Please get rid of that hideous and ugly metro garbage UI. You guys really got tons of negative feedback regarding the UI and it's still unchanged?
Have a Linux and OSX project now porting to Windows. The lack of C++11 support is the biggest problem. We're having to re-write a lot of perfectly valid code because we cannot compile in Windows. Please provide more information on C++11 support so we'll know what to expect.
@Tan Asad – yes, that is a logical thing to do in terms of integration of InRelease into our TFS experiences. We are working out details on the how and when – stay posted for more updates on this plan in a few weeks
@Adam Silford – Yes, having InRelease work with both VS2013 and VS2012 without having to install multiple versions is a reasonable ask. We hear your feedback and will factor it in when we define our compat matrix. Thanks for reporting.
As for C++ 11, they extended idea from 'going native' to 'going native cash'. So, full C++ 11 support will be from VS 2013
Very neat stuff! I'm also very interested to know if this new head-up feature integrates with SVN for the change tracking, or if it is TFS-only.
Will you act on the #1 request on uservoice?
Excelent!
@CosmicBagel, Stay tuned for pricing/licensing and upgrade details. We'll have more on that as we get closer to release.
@Matt Ring, that's more a symptom of how I pull together screenshots. You won't find that anywhere in the product. That's a screenshot from a custom process someone had created to show how an organizations that wants a very involved taxonomy might do it. Out of the box there's only 2 levels: Feature and Backlog Item. We did talk about using terminology like "Epic" but some in the Scrum community waved us away from that. Of course you can customize it to be anything you like.
@Greg, Yes, adding checkboxes or some other form of single click way to select files is still on our list of things to do. We wanted to do it already, we just weren't able to get to it. Hopefully soon.
@Jesper, I'm not going to dwell on this but clearly there's a lot of interest in C++ and you've articulated your frustration reasonably well so I feel it deserves a response. First, I don't work on the C++ team and it's a bit tenuous for me to speak for them but I have talked to them about it and can share some thoughts. They understand that C++ 11 support it important. They hear the feedback. They weren't able to get in in VS 2012 (and I think we all regret it) but that's that. So, they released a CTP a few months after VS 2012 shipped to give people a preview. There was conversation of putting it into a Visual Studio 2012 Update, however, the feeling was that, given the nature and magnitude of the changes and type of testing cycle an Update affords, the probability of serious regressions was too high. So the decision was made to roll those capabilities into VS 2013 instead. As we get more experience with Updates will that kind of risk assessment change – I strongly believe so. Knowing then what we know now, would we have made that decision differently, I don't know but I doubt it. You can be confident there will be C++ 11 improvements in VS 2013. I'm also confident that it won't include everything everyone wants. I don't think it's hard to say that our C++ compiler is further behind the standard than we want and we are discussing what we can do to change that.
Brian
@Christian, We've played with various approaches to make those particular events less obtrusive. I'll pass on your suggestion to the team.
@Knut, At this time, the heads up display feature is not extensible but it will be in the future.
Brian
@Brian, Thanks for the clarification! Otherwise very excited about the other features you've laid out so far.
Please get back the feature that in the productivity power tools (v2010) which shows the member of a class when mouse hover the class(screen shot is here in case I didn't make myself clear——[http://qpic.cn/ys6hWTUPU].). it really an awesome feature that we can't miss!
TFS "always-connected" mode is a no-go for a version control solution.
Also, being VS-actions based, instead of file content based, is prohibitive.
Until these issues are fixed, I'll stick with SVM or Git. Thanks.
Jake, TFS 2012 brought Local Workspaces that work in the same way Subversion does. TFS 2013 brings Git integration to on-premise Team Foundation Server – it's already available on visualstudio.com.
WRT pending changes, in the Team Explorer view I've really come to appreciate the tree view approach. It groups pending changes in a way that makes sense most of the time. I think many of it's drawbacks could be addressed with two features. 1) A way to check in a single (or couple of) files amongst a whole bunch of pending changes. That could be check boxes by individual items or perhaps multi-select of tree view items. 2). Introduce a pivot view other than Path. I would like a pivot view on Pending Change type so I can discern merge edits from non-merge edits. Another pivot view would be just the filename – I would envision this to be flat list with folder displayed as well (left ellipsized as the right part of the path is the most interesting). IOW while having a pop-out pending changes is nice, it would also be nice to enhance the non-popped out UI.
Regarding the Team Explorer button colors I've seen in the demos. I really liked where VS 2012 ended up color wise. I think it struck a decent balance between being too bland and too garish. IMO the Team Explorer home screen button colors are a bit on the garish side – sorry. I'd like to see them toned down just a tad. I know, seems like you guys can't win when it comes to colors. 😉
Keith Hill, WRT #1, That's quite a valid point, it can be annoying moving everything except your file to "Excluded" when you already have excluded changes, because after check-in you have to move your previously included files back.
WRT #2, I don't think you should ever have "merge" and "non-merge" changes in the same Workspace, this is something I have avoided in Subversion and TFS alike. I only ever merge using a "Clean" workspace.
Totally awesome stuff, cloud load testing is going to be a great solution. Nice work guys!
What will be the minimum target Windows version for native C++?
@Azarien: VS2013 will continue to support targeting down-level to Windows XP from C++.
C++11 fans: Brian articulated well the state of C++11 support. The only thing I'd add is that we'll be sharing more details around our plans for C++11 in a couple of weeks in Herb Sutter's session at the Build conference.
very promising (and needed!) improvements for tfs — thanks msft!
Hooray..! Team Foundation Service can be a an enterprise solution over the on-premise install. Would you happen to know when SharePoint and SSRS integration will be released for off-premise TFS?
@Dave Shaw Good point on using a clean workspace for a merge but I've seen it happen the non-ideal way. 😮 Another use scenario for a pivot on pending change type would be to see adds, deletes, edits and renames grouped together.
Is there really no improvement in work items (i.e. we still have battleship gray, we still have limited controls, and we don't have any hierarchies beyond areas and iterations, etc)? From what I'm seeing 2012 and soon to be 2013 aren't really helping me make the case to other business units to upgrade from TFS 2005 or Rally. Seriously the work item functionality in TFS doesn't need a fresh set of paint…it needs a major overhaul…like a new engine in a car.
Whilst I am actually quite content with the current functionality, if any of the "pivot" style changes suggested by "Keith Hill" are looked at, it would make sense to replicate them when viewing in a Changeset/Shelveset/Code Review Request too.
Brian et al. Great work on VS/TFS 2013, I'm really excited for them both.
@Adam Evar – good point on the need for WIT improvements. Does the Tags feature apply to WIT? I think it does. OTOH I've been wanting parameterized queries (where the query execution pops UI to allow the end user to specify certain query parameters) since the first release. 🙁
Will you finally port Visual Studio to Linux and MacOS X?
Really exited about this. Will it be easy to upgrade from 2012 to 2013 ?
Please, add better editor support for text templates
@Tristan:
I just finished my first set of T4 Templates that generate a complete set of EF5 Context, Models and Configuration classes for our production databases. This has saved me a tremendous amount of time and I am quite liking what I see so far.
What additional features are you looking for?
Just curious.
@Keith Hill – Thanks for the feedback on Team Explorer. We've built a better filter experience for pending changes in 2013, and in the future we want to improve it further by allowing you to filter by changetype (i.e. merge, rename, edit) which I think would give you what you're looking for. Regarding the colors – we're still working through some final design tweaks on the TE Home page, so you can expect that what you see in RTM will be different from what you see above. The direction we're heading in now has much more subtle use of color rather than the bold colors we're using today.
@Tristan – can you elaborate of what you mean by Text Templates? Thanks!
@Matt Ring It is a good thing that we are not forced to use Scrum terms. I do see the value of a common "language", but they sound quite silly in the context of Agile development. But most important, some people find the sports connection quite offensive and refuse to use those terms.
One thing that annoyed me about Visual Studio 2012 is if you wrote extensions, you couldn't target Visual Studio 2010. I know that generally we need Visual Studio 2010 installed anyway to test it, but it was annoying not being able to code in 2012 (I know, you could make a second project and solution file etc)
@Natalie Wells @ MSFT, @Charles Ryan
I mean better editor features to work with T4 Text Templates (files with *.tt extension). For now there is no formatting, colors, intelliiense and other features, that are available with VB/C#/C++ languages. I am using VS Express, and cannot use VS extensions that provide these features for editing T4 files. If MS developed this useful tool, then should provide better support, than rely on other companies.
Any word on lab management improvements? Will we be able to use any of the new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 with TFS 2013?
I'm wondering if there's any new release of the TFS Integration platform planned? We're still running TFS 2005, TFS 2008, TFS 2010, and TFS 2012 and we aren't able to collapse all of the servers into one collection without the loss of fidelity or reliable sync. Is there any improvement on the horizon in the integration space?
Will we be able to do work item queries on items across team projects? Will we be able to query on tags? Will we be able to customize the fields on test plans?
Just watched the teched keynote, will we have hierarchical teams so that we can show matrixed resources capacity across scenarios and features?
Hi Brian,
Visual Studio 2013 looks very promissing 🙂 is there any update on .Net Framework?
Regards,
Vinod
All that looks awesome.
I, personally, like C++ coding and I`m looking forward to hear any news about
– C++ refactoring ?
– Ctrl-Click to go to declaration ?
– Class, metod, variable renames (with all usages auto-replace) ?
– Symbol find-usage ?
– Better auto-complete and smart symbols auto completion on typing code ?
Thanks
Did you guys put some color back into the Visual Studio UI? Because it looks like you added colors in the toolbar buttons and the UI has a VS 2010 look to it. Or it's just VS Color Theme Editor?
Its looking great. But right now we are still on TFS2010 due to blocking issues in all current updates. So right now we are waiting for CU3 to see if we can upgrade.
I like the fast release of new features, but I prefer slower cadence with less errors.
@Jake, We added an SVN like mode in TFS 2012 – so no more need to checkout files or be connected to do your work. Also in TFS 2013, we are adding Git support for truly offline version control.
@Keith, I think Matt responded to your points. If I could paste a picture in a comment, I'd show you what the current front runner for the new TE colors is.
@Le, No, I don't have a date for that yet. It's something on our backlog but we won't get to it in the next few months.
@Adam, I'm a bit surprised. We've added quite a lot to the work item tracking system release over release. I don't think I could possibly enumerate them all but I'll name a few: Backlog planning, Sprint planning, task board, kanban board, Improved full text search, work item hierarchies and queries, tagging, improved visuals, work item categories, ability to compare two fields in a query, Project Server integration, and I'll bet I've only named half of them.
Brian
@_Devid_, Yes, it should be very easy to upgrade. We've worked hard to keep compatibility very high. The biggest effort would be updating any custom process templates you have to take advantage of new features.
@Lou, We haven't done a bunch of new Lab Management features this release but we have kept it up to date with the latest versions of Windows/SCVMM.
@Dan L, I'm afraid we haven't made many changes to the integration platform in the past while. I know it needs some work.
@Kiersten, You can query work items across team projects in the same collection but not across collections. Right now Tags is a filtering mechanism. We haven't added query support but I expect we will. We are working on the ability to customize fields on test suites now. It won't make it in TFS 2013 but I do expect it in one of the updates.
@Peter, Our Agile PPM work will enable this somewhat in 2013. We'll add more in 2013 Updates.
Brian
@Vinod, Yes, there will be a Framework update. We'll be talking about it more at Build.
@Kirill, We'll be talking about all of our C++ improvements at the Build conference. Just a couple of weeks away.
@WinMetro, We have done work to improve color and contrast. We'll be detailing all of those changes at the Build conference – and you'll be able to get a preview build and see it for yourself.
Brian
Where can we get more information on TFS 2013's implementation of "Agile Portfolio Management"?
Is is possible to use InRelease right now with TFS 2012 under Microsoft's license?
@Jason, the best way for now is to track http://tfs.visualstudio.com. We'll be releasing our Agile Porfolio Management improvements there first. No, you currently have to obtain InRelease through InCycle. We're working on finalizing the acquisition and then will release a "Microsoft" version under our licensing policies as soon as possible – that generally takes a few months.
Brian
Will TFS 2013 on-prem support Live/Microsoft authentication?
@Josh, Our on premises server will still only support Active Directory and local Windows accounts in 2013. It's something we'll think about in the future but demand for Microsoft Account support on prem hasn't been particularly high.
Brian
Any chance the licensing for kanban boards will be changing? we'd love to be able to have our clients use them but they really don't want VS ultimate licenses.
@Betty, You don't need VS Ultimate – you need VS Premium or Test Professional. We haven't announced licensing for 2013 yet. There won't be a major overhaul but I think there will be some improvements. Stay tuned for more.
Brian
Wow! Great news! It's been more than three years now that we're using Inrelease 2010 product from InCycle Software here at Société Grics. That a great product and we can't wait to see it completly and seamlessly integrated to VS2013/TFS2013. That's gonna be awesome!
This list feels underwhelming. In Release is good and all but it's a very amateur solution when compared to solutions like Doors, Quality Center, TestTrack RM, or InteGreat…strange that you felt you had to acquire a company and that your internal teams couldn't deliver a better solution faster. Is there any chance we'll see significant improvements to MTM? MTM the rich client (not using a half complete web version) feels like it's in maintenance mode with very little new value being delivered. Also any improvements planned in the TFS alerting / notification space?…Bissubscribe feels so 2008. I hope there's so major news at the BUILD conference on improvements to the usability of Visual Studio…so that there's some reason to upgrade…otherwise from just this list…it seems you guys are just shipping a random collection of limited value features to "make a date".
Awesome updates, really looking forward to test drive this.
Any change on how the updates will be rolled out for VS 2013? Are we going to have slipstream support?
I posted a comment the other day but I cannot see it, maybe there was a technical problem, or maybe the comment was removed because it contained links and some filter considered it spam – in the latter case I apologize.
I read the article and it's very interesting, as a coder I look forward for these new features, especially "Another indicator shows the status of the tests that test the method you are looking at".
I wonder if Microsoft plans to reintroduce some feature that I miss in VS 2012, such as macros (at least Quick macros, but better the full-fledged macros), or the ability to see test results in a table like the "Test Result" pane of VS 2008 and VS 2010. Call me stupid but I still feel uncomfortable with the new Test Explorer of VS 2012 even after Update 2…
@Dinos, Not sure why your first comment about it didn't show up on the comment list. I did get an email notification about it and forwarded the feedback to the right people. I think the team understands that the Test Explorer needs more work and we just need to make sure we resource it. For macros, it's more tricky. We removed them because the underlying macro technology was very old and was difficult to continue to maintain and the usage of Macros in VS was very low (we know this from telemetry data). Adding back marcros will require a different technology than we had before and a fairly significant investment. My best suggestion is to encourage people to use User Voice to vote that one up.
Brian
@Vishal, We think Updates for 2013 will be similar to what we did for 2012. We are exploring providing slipstreaming but no decision yet.
Brian
@Brian: Thank you very much for your reply. I won't link Uservoice directly as I don't want to look like a "uservoice feature spammer" 🙂 but at the moment there are almost 2000 votes for bringing back macros, rank#12 in the top chart, not a number to underestimate. So in Uservoice comments (and in MSDN forums, again I won't link them but they're easy to find) some people – including myself – wonder if that "telemetry" is reliable or not… most programmers I know disable CEIP as the first thing after installing Visual Studio or SQL Server.(furthermore we work a lot in disconnected VMs, that cannot send telemetry at all, not to mention automatic crash reports, and cannot download useful NuGet stuff, and so on…)
Can you PLEASE have a VS 2010 theme option?!? I can't understand why a company with Microsoft's resources to study ergonomics and user satisfaction can't understand that if you really, really, really want to make a radical UI change from a well-liked product (VS 2010, Windows 7), you need a "MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT USED TO!!" option or else you're going to annoy hordes of users. Visual Studio is the best development suite out there and has been forever. It's a standout product, but 2012 is a visual downgrade if not an outright eyesore.
@Dino, there are, at least, 2 things that can go wrong with telemetry – 1) It can not be a representative sampling and 2) You can interpret the data to mean something other than what it actually means. Hence, the phrase, "lies, damn lies, and statistics." We use data to inform decisions but it's rarely the only input. I can't tell you for sure what percentage of our customers used macros. We have enough data to know that it's not a huge percentage but we also know from other data that those who used it really miss it. We are going to have to make the decision about when/if to invest in a new implementation. UserVoice is the best way to give us quantitative feedback. Appreciate you not "gaming" it though. We do look for UserVoice suggestions that have been artificially voted up and discount them. At this point, I don't believe that one has been gamed.
Brian
@Pete R
I feel you pain about this horrible UI. The VS2012 is unusable for me. My eyes are aching all the time. With the ThemeExtension + the addon NiceVS you can fix the UI a bit.
Please add the option to get a VS 2010-like Find/Replace dialog back. The quick find mini-window is infuriating. I want to type my entire search query and press 'Find' without getting the incremental search results on every keypress. It's been about a year and I still have to hover over the little icons to figure out when one means 'in all files' or 'regex'. I just want to read the text on a button in a window. This has killed my productivity so much I have almost stopped using search. With the team explorer stuff addressed, this is my only real remaining grievance w/VS2012. It would be very cool to get full-text indexed search (localdb maybe?)
Is the release of VS 2013 going to be tied with a new version of .Net framework? Any new language enhancements coming to c#? I am particularly interested in any GC [garbage collection] enhancements for managed languages to make them more performant.
@teeboy, We're going to be describing our improvements in languages, runtimes and platforms at the Build conference. Hold tight another week and a half – there will be a ton more stuff.
Brian
Hi there, are there any significant improvements around Test Manager
The new features look fantastic. Any chance of moving IntelliTrace to VS Premium by any chance? I am yet to see any customer or partner using Ultimate edition 🙂
不错耶，新版本出来了，挺高兴的哦！
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@DaveJ, Our biggest investments in the release for the test case management/manual testing scenarios have been in our new web based experience. We've made some improvements that also benefit our rich client experience – like improved customization, support for the latest versions of Windows/SCVMM, etc.
@Lambros, Every release we revisit our licensing decisions and make adjustments. There will be some as part of VS 2013 but we aren't quite ready to share them. I suspect over the next few months we'll document the changes we are making.
Brian
I am hearing from my developers that they:
"believe centralized TFS version control is dead and that all the investment from the "Microsoft TFS" guys is going into GIT version control…so we should migrate to GIT and abandon TFS version control."
Can you shed any light on the future of centralized TFS version control?
Apparently there are long standing bugs and issues with baseless merges that haven't been fixed for several releases…
@Lou, It is most certainly not dead. You'll notice that most of the investment we've been making (in the web version control features for example – code commenting, annotate, diff, etc, or Team Explorer improvements) apply to both TFVC and Git. We believe that both centralized and distributed version control paradigms are important. It's certainly true, at the moment, that we are investing more heavily in DVCS – because it's so far behind TFVC. We've got a lot of work to just get them to parity. They won't be identical but they will generally be close to parity.
I'm not sure what merge issues they are referring to. There are certainly things about the way a path based merge system works that can be difficult to get used to and can't really be "fixed". If there really are significant bugs, we'd want to fix them. If you can share details – Connect links or UserVoice links, we can look at it.
Brian
Is there any hope to make the installation of the lab agents easier for the upgrade to TFS 2013? We have a really hard time finding all of the VMs stored in our library that have RTM 2012, or Update 1 for 2012, or Update 2 for 2012 and get all of the environments up-to-date with the lastest and greatest update…and now that we'll have to think about TFS 2013…if these releases become yearly surely you guys will make it much easier to upgrade our lab agents, right?
TFS 2013 upgrade path –
Will we be able to go from 2010 to 2013 ? or will be need to go through TFS 2012 first ?
Many thanks
@Greg, Yes, you will be able to upgrade directly from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012.
Brian
Any chance that TFS will be able to do code coverage *without* having to have Visual Studio installed on a build server? Some IT depts aren't very keen on having developer IDEs installed on servers.
@Keith, It's a reasonable request but not in this release.
Brian
@LabAdmin101, I agree that this is not an ideal experience today. Currently, you can have templates stored in the library without the test agent installed on them (except if you are using network isolation). Then, in MTM, you have an experience to "Install agents", which will install the right version of the agent. You also have an experience to upgrade agents from MTM in existing environments. The problem with all of this is that you will have to do this for every update and for every environment. We are thinking about how to simplify this, but it won't be in this release.
Vijay (MS)
Pending changes window , not much difference, It is one of the core work areas and simply giving the ability to pop-out or dock does not help solve the core UI problem in window itself. It only makes developers life difficult. VS2010 GUI was way too simple to use in this area.
Is VS2013 going to give us ability to check-in a shelve set from GUI. This will be really nice little feature as many a times once we are through with code review, we can simply check in shelve set without having worry about picking individual modified file from dreaded "pending changes" window.
Visual Studio 2013 have custom Install same like VS2010 ?
I'm confused about three things:
(a) Is there a clear list of what will and will not be supported between the cloud and on-premise versions, or can I assume that ALL features that come to the cloud will come to the on-premise version in a reasonable time?
(b) Is there any way to use the cloud version, but store the code on-premise?
(c) When will the cloud service allow customized process, etc. (if ever)?
With the release of the preview build of VS 2013 coming on June 26th at BUILD, should we expect a version of the TFS power tools to sim-ship on the same day? Looking forward to getting everyone on our team using VS 2013 as soon as possible…but the power tools have historically been a challenge to get fast adoption.
Will VS 2013 finally be xcopy installable?
终于有中国人发表评论了，少见啊！
有新版本啦？
@Raymond, I don't believe there are any substantial change to custom install but I'm checking.
@NJBob, 1) We're working on publishing a list of the differences. You can assume that generally TFService and on-prem will stay close. There are likely to be some features in one but not the other and we'll try to be clear about that. We working now to add the missing cloud features. 2) I guess it depends on what you want to use. Certainly you can use TFService for some things while using an on-prem version for others. But there's no way to get TFService to store its data in your data center. 3) It definitely will. I don't have a date yet.
Brian
@Neil, no, VS will not be xcopyable.
Brian
@Brian Harry MS,
Thanks for your detailed answers. Can you please help me with another question? I would prefer to use TFService, but I'm having a hard time getting comfortable with source in the cloud. I've read about the triple-redundant backups and enterprise security, but that sounds like marketing speak. Is there something with teeth that I can use to sell to my stakeholders regarding security? For instance:
– Do you guys truly eat-your-own-dog-food in that your source is stored in the exact same way and place as ours? IF so, that would be enough for me. If not (or if you can't disclose) can you elaborate on security? I understand you can't go into details without putting security at risk; but I would feel much better if there is anything you can tell me to get more comfortable with this.
– Since there is no way to use TFService with source in our datacenter, another question: I've read that accidentally deleted (by us) projects and source files are gone forever (i.e. we can't ask you guys to restore our stuff…you only restore our stuff if you lose it). True?
– If above is true, I've also read that I can sync our source to a local machine. I have searched but can't find anything written about automating that process… can it be automated?
Thanks for all your news, information, and help on this thread!
Bob
Hello, to satisfy an office discussion, can you tell me how many people work on each release of Visual studio software?
@NJBob, are you planning to use Git or TFVC? Using Git you will always have a copy of your entire repository if you "clone" it.
Also, in Source Control systems, there is not very many ways to lose code. If you delete you can undelete. You can also destroy, but that requires admin priv's and should not be used in normal working practices.
TFS 2013 looks interesting. We are rolling out a plan to install TFS 2012 in our company. How much change is required from 2012 to 2013(when released).
Mohamed
@Dave Shaw thank you for your comments. We are planning to use TFVC. I have not explored all of the features between TFVC and Git to know if Git will accommodate my needs for branching and shelving.
Awesome! How i wish that crystal reports,blend is included there… and also the install shield is the same in vs2010
@Raymond, There were certainly some changes but you can still pick features as part of custom install.
Brian
@Adam R, Unfortunately no. We're working hard right now to drive down our TFS 2013 bug count. As soon as that's on a glide path to release we'll work on getting the Power Tools updated. That's likely to be several weeks. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Brian
@NJBob, I understand your concern. Yes, we do use TFService for a bunch of stuff but not for everything (or even a lot of things). I've got a couple of feature teams in my team that use is for their product work and then there are scattered teams around the company using it. I wouldn't yet call it a open and shut proof of confidence. There are many reasons why we don't use it for all of our production work and most of them have to do with feature gaps – Active Directory integration, Reporting, scale (remember DevDiv is like 15TB of data), etc.
But, we do design and test for security rigorously. In fact, we are just now having one of the company's central security team do a penetration testing pass. Every operation on the service requires some authorization (there are no anonymous capabilities today). All traffic to and from the service is https encrypted. We believe the system is secure.
As for recovery of deleted content, yes, that's our current policy. The reason is that, today, recovering data from backup is a fairly labor intensive process. We're working on an automated process for it that will enable us to be more flexible. Remeber though that there's a difference in TFS between "delete" and "destroy". If you, for example, delete source code, it can be undeleted. Only if you destroy it is it really gone. You can restrict permission on destroy very narrowly.
TFVC and Git have different approaches to sync and different granularity (because Git brings down all history and TFVC does not). But in both cases it would be easy to configure and automated scheduled task that used the command line to sync down the source periodically.
I hope this helps,
Brian
@imthi, The upgrade should be pretty straight forward – particularly if you start with TFS 2012.3
@Paulo, It's dang hard to compute such things but there's well over 1,000 people working on Visual Studio in some capacity.
Brian
The quicker StyleCop and Resharper support 2013 the quicker you will have some more beta testers!
@Brian Harry MS, thank you again. I'm much more comfortable with source in the cloud. I'm sorry; but I have another question.
First, we LOVE TFService! We have decided to move completely to it. The only major problem we see is that we have many thousands of test cases in the TestLink tool, and many bugs inside Jira. We would like for TestLink and Jira to go away; but we are at a loss for how to migrate from TestLink and Jira.
Is there any migration path for test cases and bugs? I see no import feature on TFService.
Thanks for being so responsive with extremely helpful answers!
Bob
@NJBob, the only real tool is the TFS Integration Platform : tfsintegration.codeplex.com
Brian has stated that they are looking at improving the tooling, but if you can't find it on the TFS Integration Platform, you may have to roll your own using the TFS API.
Dave
@NJBob,
For test cases in TestLink, if you can export those tests into Excel, then you can use the "Test Case Migrator Plus" tool (http://tcmimport.codeplex.com) to import them into the TFService.
You can use the same tool for importing Bugs from Jira (after exporting to Excel first) – if there are relationships between test cases/bugs, the tool will preserve those links as well.
You can contact me at "ravishan@microsoft.com" if you run into issues with the above tool.
We just lost out on MTM and TFS environment due to the limitations of MTM when compared against QTP and quality center. Literally, our CIO made the call and because of the lack of features and capabilities with MTM and codedUI we as a development group have to go to using GIT (it's free) so that QA can get QTP (costs $250k)…. can you get MTM in 2013 to be feature comparative to QTP so we'll have a chance to use TFS for all it's ALM goodness???
@Tom, can you send me email at bharry at Microsoft dot com. I'd really like to understand what the key gaps are for your org.
Brian
@Brian Harry MS, I've got to tell you that I'm with Tom on MTM. I've been researching this all night and I can not believe that I can't find a global, enterprise tool within MTM.
Here are the gaps I see:
– Using a free tool, TestLink, I can have testers all over the world log in to TestLink and pass, fail, block, comment, etc. I have a QA team that literally manages the world from our office. Tens of thousands of cases and tests, and it all rolls up by version, release, etc. From one simple point, our QA team can assign tests, monitor tests, for the world. No, they can't see recordings… no, they can't record sessions… but the most important features here are that when global users pass or fail a case, that all of the information (comments, reports, statistics, coverage, history) is all available to our domestic QA team.
– If I understand MTM correctly, I have to pay north of $2,000 for each of these testers around the world, and then the data is stored on their local machine. I see no way to collect and aggregate all of the outcomes of all of the tests from all over the world. The data returned is great… better than TestLink; but what good is it if I have to hunt it down all over the world? I suppose I could set up RDP sessions to capture the data behind our firewall; but at what cost to set that up and then collect and aggregate the data.
Am I missing something?
@NJBob – Let me respond to the technical part of your questions:
For #1 – you can use the Hosted TFS Service for this – all the basic Test Management features can be accessed from the browser (without having to install any client tools) and it can be accessed from all over the world.
For #2 – the data is not stored on the local machines of individual testers, it is stored in the TFS server. If you are wanting to open up the single TFS server across all sites, then there is a mechanism for doing so. You don’t have to aggregate this data from multiple servers.
@Ravishan – MSFT, thank you. However, please allow me to clarify:
I have only set one one instance of MTM, on my local machine and run some tests.
Using TFServer, the only data that I can see online after performing tests is the last outcome of a particular test case (and of course, bugs created via MTM). I can not see:
– history of who ran the case, how often, prior results, comments (even if entered via the TFService Test tab), videos, logs, reports showing coverage against a suite, graphical bar or pie charts showing pass/fail results.
– on TFService I've can write queries that show pass or fail, but I have lost all of the rich information on MTM above.
Are you saying that if I install another instance of MTM on another machine (machine B) that I'll be able to see all of the activity from my local machine as well as the videos, etc. from machine B?
If so, that is what I'm missing and MTM will be far superior to TestLink.
Thanks!
oh lock very good
@Ravi – Access the Test hub, viewing / changing / running a test case via the web still requires a full blown VS premium + MSDN license correct? So over $2000 per person when we get that ability from seapine for free. How can I have 200+ people be able to viewing / change / run a test case via the web without having to shell out $400,000.
@NJBob – as I mentioned, the Web access provides basic Test management capabilities. So, you are right, the web access currently does not provide the capability to view test results/analysis or graphs. For this, you would need to use MTM.
On the second part of your question – Yes, if you install another MTM on machine B and connect to the same TFS server, you will be able to view all the data done from either machine A or machine B, since all the data is actually stored in the TFS server and not on local machines.
@Ravishan – MSFT thank you very much. I installed a 2nd eval copy and see everything on both machines. I'm sorry for my naive post and would understand if you deleted it. MTM seems to be an incredible valuable tool. At this point, the only thing major thing I would love to see sooner rather than later is the ability to customize the TFService.
Thanks!
Bob
Download ?
Is there anything to test VSTO Excel Add-in?
is it possible to get the Team Rooms for TFS 12 (Server Version)?
Awesome! Absolutely stunning how you guys manage to deliver value in QU updates and yet have so much more to deliver in the form of VS 2013. (2)
@neo, See: blogs.msdn.com/…/visual-studio-2013-preview-is-available.aspx
@Hueppauff, I'm afraid not. Team Room is a feature of TFS 2013.
Brian
How do we get the Goals and Initiatives to show up? Features is there in the preview but I can't see anyway to add the additional product backlogs? Is there a plan for managing multiple backlogs?
As a developer of mobile apps for multiple platforms we are using TFService Projects for both TFVC (HTML5) and Git (iOS, Android).
We also have globally distributed teams under the Scrum Ambassador model. So, a dev team member on the iOS team occasionally has tasks/PBI's across teams and projects.
I don't see any way to roll capacity for Ambassadors across projects, or especially across the default collection.
I've read some stuff about portfolio management, but can't find it… any suggestions?
Is there, (or will there be), a comprehensive, top-level, back-everything-up (all source, all version history, shelfsets, Features, PBI's, tasks, teams/members, etc.)… or at a minimum the above stuff involving source code…that can be automated? Or is the only/entire solution to have developers sync projects to their local machines and attempt to try to ensure that happens and back up their machines?
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Will there be the ability to transfer projects between Collections without needing a third-party tool?
This is really overdue with this product
Will TFS work item multi-select control/checked box ship in next version 2013? We have alot of trouble on current version to create many unnecessary fields to cover the limitation.
How to exclude weekends from burn down chart in TFS 2013?
@Richard, We've not yet done any Skype integration but it's something we are thinking about. You can of course link to a video from the team room.
Brian
@Jason Whittington, The new Agile Portfolio Management tools are being built to work best when all the teams are within a single team project. With a single team project, you can ensure that the process across all the different teams is consistent and rollup and traceability is a simpler matter. However, since the traceability is managed by a work item links, and it is possible to link and query for work items across team projects, it will be possible to create and view trace relationships that span team projects. The burden will be on the customer to make sure that the process templates are consistent across team projects so rollup/tracing will work. However, as we add more functionality, it is likely that some functionality will not be available unless everything is within a single team project.
Brian
@Rossmcn, That was just a screenshot from a test system that someone had setup a custom process template on. The out of the box templates are a bit simpler but it demonstrates you can tune it to the process you use. Unfortunately, not on the service yet but we are working on that.
@NJBob, We have a bunch of related requirements in this area – including he ability to transfer projects, in tact between on prem and the service. We're still sorting out exactly what we can build in this space. For now, we keep backups of production data in the event something goes horribly wrong.
@James, No we haven't added that feature in this release.
@Rohit, you can't exclude weekends though that's near the top of our backlog and I'm hoping that we will get to it in the next couple of sprints.
Brian
@Brian Harry MS, I also vote for excluding weekends; but with the ability to add them back in on a sprint-by-sprint basis. 🙂
Hi everyone,
I have created tfs projects using TFS service and a have used different process template, but i can not see work item : Goals and initiatives. thanks for help.
@NJBob – Portfolio Management – We've got the basics covered here: tfs.visualstudio.com/…/manage-your-backlog. We've got more coming here…
Capacity – You're right. We haven't yet invested yet in any "cross project/team" views of sprint planning or capacity. It's something we're tracking closely though. It likely a part of a larger investment we'll make around "teams" and managing "teams".
没有Eclipse好！
i have no time to learn the new technology ,I have to use the steady type,
We are about to migrate from TFS2010 to TFS2012, a crazy idea that struck my mind is to go directly to TFS2013 preview then when there is the final out we'll do the update. The question is: is the preview "stable" enough to support production of a team of about 10+ people ?
Thanks !
@Nicoale, I believe it is. We've been using it and working well.
Brian
@Brian, sorry I meant our clients who don't have VS licenses at all would like to use the kanban boards with our team (didn't mean to mention ultimate). But they're stuck with limited tfs web which can't access such features which would seem ideal.
@Brian Harry MS
Any chance this works in TF Service (or will work soon?)
blogs.msdn.com/…/how-to-enable-work-item-only-view-in-team-web-access-2010.aspx
@NJBob, no, that doesn't work on the service today because we don't have any licensing stuff on the service today – it's all free. As we introduce pricing I'm sure we'll evolve the licensing as we learn more. It's not clear to me that licensing on the service will be identical to the on premises product.
Brian
@Brian Harry MS
Thanks for the quick answer. This is a critical piece for many people, like me. I'd prefer not to have to run a separate bug tracker (like jira) for customer-facing issues. Hence, I'd like to publish a URL to multiple customers, let them create bugs against whatever they like (but — critically — only see the bugs they have entered.)
Short of that, I have to run two systems and either integrate them or have people copying and pasting, and neither of these solutions are ideal.
Thanks for considering this.
How do we get the Goal/Initiative/Feature/User Story functionality in the TFS service? Is this in the TFS 2013 Preview?
We at Infosys is having a big bet on this.. we are in a journy of building a solution for Scaling Agile into Larger complex enterprise using TFS ecosystem
@Brain, I was trying to test the new cloud load testing service without much success.
Every time I try to execute the load test I receive this error: "An unexpected error occurred. Please close this page and re-open it using Load Test Manager, available in the Load Test menu.
The request could not be completed as the communication with the service failed.
Check the inner exception for more details."
Since the Test wasn't executed and failed before the initialization process there are no exceptions.
The Load Test Manager seems to be empty.
Regards,
Oren
@Oren,
I haven't seen that error before. If the Load Test Manager is empty, then this looks like a client-side issue, where Visual Studio is not able to communicate with the service. We'll likely need logs from you to help us investigate. Can you please mail me at darshand.at.microsoft.com to take this discussion forward and help you get past this problem?
Also, we have a forum that is monitored by our support team as well as our product team, where you can report any such problems you face going forward: social.msdn.microsoft.com/…/home
-Darshan
@A. Blood, all the functionality for it is there but the current process templates on the service have simpler hierarchies than that (e.g. Feature & Backlog item for Scrum or Feature and Requirement for CMMI). Unfortunately, you can't customize that on the service today (you can in the on premises TFS). We're working on a customization story now so I hope that, not too far down the road, I'll have a better answer but for now, you have to use one of the existing process templates.
Brian
How about the on-prem version of tfs 2013? Is Goal/Iteration/Feature baked in or is it a customization of the scrum template 3.0?
Thanks for the reply
@A. Blood, you would customize the on premises template to get that.
Brian
How do I get access to the new build templates with the pre- and post-build events? I have installed Visual Studio 2013 Preview, but I don't see the new tfs build templates.
@Bruce, Here's the answer I got to your question about the new build templates on the service:
For now he either needs to opt into the preview pool or create a new project. With the deployment this week we will be adding the template to all projects in all collections.
Brian
What are the implications of the "Agile Portfolio Management" new feature in the integration of TFS with Project Server?
The new work items (Feature, Goal, Initiative) will be able to synchronize with the Project Server or you intend to switch the Project Server users to TFS?
@DS19, Yes, the new agile portfolio management features should continue to work well with Project Server integration.
Brian
Is there going to be any tfs build server support for the f# make tool? and for java projects any gradle build support?
Will TFS 2013 security change from TFS 2012? Today, we add people to group on the projects and on the sharepoint portals. Will that remain the same?
@Carol, no change in that area. Of course, what we recommend is creating an AD group and adding it to both TFS and SharePoint and then just adding people to the AD group so you only have to do it once. I realize that doesn't work for every situation but it's the simplest solution.
Brian
感觉界面跟2012没差。。。
How do I enable Team Rooms in Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview? I have it installed, but team rooms are nowhere to be found.
Hello Brian,
Any hope to have an easy way to change the default days-off as we have different days-off in the Middle East?
Thanks
@M.Radwan – Yes, we're working on this. You can do this today on-premises by updating the process configuration, but I'm not sure that qualifies as "easy". social.msdn.microsoft.com/…/how-to-change-the-default-days-off-for-all-sprints-in-tfs-11-beta. We're working on a way to exclude weekends from the burndown and make this more configurable – that update should be coming soon (this fall). Ping me if you have any specifics you want to cover.
Thanks.
Aaron
If we aren't quite ready to move production TFS to TFS2013 RC… is there a way for us to take a TFS 2012 Controller and Build Agent… and install VS2013 RC on it (agent) and start leveraging the new MSBuild in the TeamBuild? I can't seem to figure out a way to get a 2012 Team Build agent to use the new MSBuild (12.0).
@Andy,
You can do this, all you need to do is edit the ToolPath property of the MSBuild activity in the XAML. There is no process parameter defined for this so you are going to have to customize the XAML.
Nice stuff Brian. But in the online free TFS website, https://<myname>.visualstudio.com/ I only see Features. I'd like to try the other higher levels. Are they coming in the first release?
@numberone155, That's just the default template. We erred on the side of keeping it simple. Once we expose the ability to customize the template on the service, you will be able to add more levels. I don't know exactly when that will be but I'm expecting in the next 12 months.
Brian
Brian – any chance you can share your thinkings around what "customize the template" will look like on the service?
We are in the process of trying to get budgetary approval to stand up a TFS Server…and the main reason we can't use the service today, is because we can't customize the process template fields / states….we need to customize it pretty heavily…and if that's coming to the service….we'd be really interested in the service…and we may be able to just use a development VM for the next 6-9 months…if we'll be able to import in all of our code (with history intact) and process template customizations to the service.
Very keen to not have to go to the IT steering comitee as we are moving more and more to the cloud…and setting up local infrastructure is VERY expensive in our datacenter.
@Tyler, the plan is to ultimately have, roughly, the full flexibility we have in the on-prem product. It's going to come in pieces, likely. We're hoping to do it in a more embedded and friendly way than the current XML files and process template editor. We do plan to eventually enable full import with history but it will be a little while. Right now we are working on export and we'll start working on import some time after that is done.
Brian
I want to understand where the Work Item type dependencies are stored. Example – An Add Task option appears with any Requirements ( or the + sign option) . I am planning to have a series of custom work item type defined with dependecies and need them to appear in a similar fashion for each of them. is it possible ?
@Ramesh Gopalan1, What you can do is define your Requirements work item form to have a links control which is filtered to only show links of a particular link type to a particular work item type. For example, you could create a tab on your Requirements work item, which has a links control which only shows Predecessor/Successor links to a workitems of type: "Dependency". This control will only show those links, and when the "+" button on the links control will only allow you to create those types of links to those types of work items. So you can create an experience which guides the user down the path of success.
However, if they go an create a link outside that links control, there is nothing that keeps them from creating a Pred/Succ link to any type of work item they want. We don't have that kind of constraint. But many customers have success by setting up a filtered linkscontrol in the work item type.
Here's an older (but relevant) blog post on that: blogs.msdn.com/…/controlling-which-link-types-are-displayed-on-a-work-item-form.aspx
Here's the official documentation:
msdn.microsoft.com/…/dd638522(v=vs.120).aspx
How is it even possible that the "Pending Changes" UI could become even more degenerate? /sigh
What the hell is wrong with your pricing?
Test Edition is more expensive than Pro but doesn't allow for Unit Testing or Coded UI???
Great Products but your pricing and edition feature matrix is screwed up big time.
@Seriously, Test Professional isn't for developers. It doesn't include Visual Studio. Therefore, it doesn't include things like Unit Testing or Coded UI Testing. Both of those capabilities require you to write code and Test Pro isn't for writing code. Test Pro is for people who need access to test case management, manual testing, feedback management, requirements management, enterprise planning, etc. Usually this is testers and business analysts.
Brian
Brian, We purchased the retail version instead of the MSDN version of TFS2010 a few years ago because of the 5 non-CAL named user accounts it was packaged with.
Does TFS2013 retail version continue the packaging of those 5 user accounts?
I guess Rooms would come in handy when you're dealing with a large set of developers. In a place where there are 3 to 4 devs working together in single office space, I can't imagine this feature would be used much (if at all). Nevertheless, it's a great addition to TFS.
@eheinsen, Yes, we didn't change the retail licensing terms. It still comes with 5 included users.
@Albert, yes the chat aspect of team rooms is significantly diminished if you have everyone in the same physical room. The "activity feed" aspect is still very valuable to catching up with what the team has been doing.
Brian
Regarding test results / graphs in the web access test hub do you know if there are any plans to include this functionality? Test web access is great, and easier than MTM, and it would be encouraging to know this might be enhanced in future releases… We just upgraded to 2013 and one of the first questions my team asked me was 'how do we access the test results' and it was disappointing to have to tell them they still need to use MTM for this.
@Sue – adding the Test results/graphs to Test Web access is definitely in the backlog (and fairly high in stack order).
Thanks
-Ravi
Nice post, it is very useful for us to understand more about the detailed of VS2013.
Hi Brian!
Do you plan to add Pending Changes window for Git repository? Currently it's grayed out when using git.
Igor
Hi Igor,
Did you have "Pending Changes" page undocked before you switch to git project? if that's the case, then yes, the page will get greyed out and prompt you to switch provider. If you close that page, and open the "Changes" Page, you should see it working properly under git provider context.
Thanks,
Jiange
Printing / exporting to office.
Fly on wall video so I can understand how to use Tfs as intended.
@Neil – tell me more here. What printing scenarios are you after? And if you give me a bit more on the context you're after for videos I can send you some links. There are some good videos on our site at: http://www.visualstudio.com/…/app-lifecycle-management-vs
What I do not like about the new pending changes window is the extra difficulty in assigning work items to a check-in.
If the Work Item query window had a button beside each work item to assign it to the current check-in, it would be much better than having to drag each work item or type in the work item id manually.
Please tell me that this will be improved in a VS 2013 update, or in VS 2014.
I would love to hear that this kind of change would be introduced into VS 2012 as well, but I can understand if it isn't. I guess I could even understand if it would absolutely have to wait until 2014, but it would really suck.
The other thing I didn't mention is the fact that you have to choose a query every time and launch it. It would be nice if it could at least select the last query you used by default and have a button to launch it.
Please don't say that this is not a big deal. Developers want to be efficient, and dragging & dropping is neat but not efficient, and finding the id & typing it in manually is not really any better.
Why the hell are all the images blurred ?
Brian,
Are you aware that the pending changes window is still borked in VS2013?
I've tried undocking the window and docking it in a number of other places, but VS never remembers where I put it, what parts of the window are expanded/collapsed, and how wide I want the columns. No matter how I configure it, VS always reverts to a tiny, narrow popup window which is completely useless.
All I want to do is to make sure TFS is going to check in the right set of files when I check in a project or solution. Why does this have to be so hard?
I can't find JavaScript in the installed Templates of VS2013 when I want to open a new project. please can somebody help me.
@Nkem – I'm sorry to hear you're missing JavaScript templates. If these are the Universal templates for Windows Phone that you're missing, there is a known issue with these that we will be fixing (you can read more about it here: social.msdn.microsoft.com/…/universal-app-template-for-winjs-and-html5). If this is about other JavaScript templates, please submit a new bug report here: connect.microsoft.com/…/CreateFeedbackForm.aspx. Thank you!
Jordan – Microsoft Visual Studio, JavaScript tools team
@Brian
Team Rooms:
Any idea how to disable entered/left the room messages?
Thank you.
@Daniel, You can't. That's high on my list of low hanging fruit to go fix as soon as we can.
Brian
Hi, do you have an official version name for those new functionalities ?
@Oren, all of this is in Visual Studio 2013 and TFS 2013. You can find the mapping of features to editions here: http://www.visualstudio.com/…/compare-visual-studio-products-vs
Brian
Brian, Thanks for the answer.
I expected to have a ready configuration in order to use Goals and Initiatives in TFS 2013, but looking here: msdn.microsoft.com/…/dn217880.aspx it seems I need to configure it myself.
Am I missing something here ?
@Oren, Yes. Out of the box, we just ship with one additional level in the backlog "Feature". We're looking at adding the "SAFe" levels to the default templates but haven't yet. So, for now, you will need to add them to the process template yourself.
Brian
In our company we have many different Applications with different Product Management and Dev teams per application and it has made sense that we create a project per application. Luckily we did put all application projects into a single Collection to allow for Cross project work assignment and queries. We are seeing integrations between our applications become more common though and a User Story from one project being cloned and assigned to another project for sprint tasks to be added managed in that Project. The mechanism we use is a custom field called Cross Project with a list of all projects in the collection. If Project A needs work done in Project B they select Project B in the cross project field. Project B Product Owner has a query looking for their project to be selected in the Cross Project field in any other project and when it occurs they clone the story into their Project and Sprint.
If we were starting out in TFS right now we would at least consider having just one very large project for all applications and breaking each Product into teams but its probably not something we could do now.
Is there any chance that Portfolio Manager might move outside a single project into the Collection Level so folks could manage work across different projects better?
In the case of integrations it would be great to have a Team at the collection level where a Goal/Theme exists pushing work down to projects. A Kanban board across projects in a Collection team would also be really useful.
– Fergal
@Fergal – Thanks for the detail and feedback. Let me share a bit about where we're headed with cross-project and portfolio management.
We recognize the pain that exists here for some of these experiences and we know we need to improve. Specifically, we want to enable you to have projects that track your "portfolio" and are connected to many other team projects. This would include wiring up backlogs and Kanban boards that support looking across projets. Your concept of Goals/Themes living at a level about the teams makes complete sense and is inline with our current thinking.
Feel free to reach out directly if you're interested in sharing more or a deeper conversation.
Aaron
I like the features backlog from a strategic planning perspective, but my issue with it is that (as far as I can tell) its almost useless when it comes to actually prioritising a backlog. That's why I've proposed this change on the Visual Studio Uservoice site: Highlight PBIs in the backlog when selecting their associated feature in the feature mapping pane.
visualstudio.uservoice.com/…/7020884-highlight-pbis-in-the-backlog-when-selecting-their
Thanks @Philip. Makes total sense. I've thought along similar lines for quite some time. We're actually doing work very soon to make it so you can re-parent in ANY view… which could make the mapping panel obsolete. Regardless, appreciate the suggestion on user voice and I'll get our team looking at this.
@Philip – just talked to the team about it. The mapping panel will remain as it's the only way to bring in "new parents". In light of that, I really like this suggestion. Consider it on our backlog. Thanks.
Brian, in "Agile Portfolio Management" you show a screen capture with a four-level hierarchy–Goal, Initiative, Feature, User Story. TFS 2013's "Agile" template supports two levels out of the box. Can you point me to an MSDN article that describes the customizations required to add levels to the work item hierarchy?
Brian, I found what I asked for. It's the MSDN article Agile Portfolio Management: Using TFS to support backlogs across multiple teams at URL msdn.microsoft.com/…/dn306083.aspx.
@AaronBjork we are very very interested in the cross team project reporting and querying features. We are finding its not possible to do rollup and build reporting across team projects. Can you please elaborate on the reporting improvements coming for multiple team projects?
As a new user of VS2013 with TFS2013/GIT I have a simple request that I can't seem to get an answer for. Is it possible to, by default, open a project with no automatic connection to the TFS server. Most of the time, I am working offline (an advantage of GIT). It is annoying that every time I open a project in VS2013, Team Explorer attempts to open the TFS connection to the project (which eventually errors out). I want to open it when I am ready (when I know an internet connection is available). So is this default, offline, behavior possible and where is the setting? Thanks in advance for any help.
hi dr Brian , im yosri an academic student, i have a problem with visual studio automation , i will grateful if you help me to resolve this problem my email is : yosri.bensalah@outlook.fr
@yosri, I’m not likely to be able to help you directly – I would only be able to direct you to someone who can. I think the best thing for you to do is to report your problem at: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/spaces/8/index.html. Our teams monitor that pretty actively and should pick it up and respond pretty quickly.
Thanks,
Brian